When I first started using Linux years ago one of the first projects that I had an interest in was WINE (Wine Is Not a Windows Emulator). The basic idea of WINE is that you could run Win32 (call it Windows) applications in Linux. It kinda sorta but didn’t really work at first it was always a hit/miss based on the specific application you were trying to run.
But now WINE developers are calling their project stable with the 1.0 release that came out this week. WINE developer Alexandre Julliard wrote in a mailing list announcement:
This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development
and beta testing…
While compatibility is not perfect yet, thousands of applications have
been reported to work very well.
The irony i suppose is that now there are more Linux application than ever, and through the magic of virtualization a user can run a full Windows install if they wanted too (though you still legally need a licenced version of Windows).
Still a tremendous achievement after a very long period – so congratulation to all WINE developers and users, vintage is a good thing.