Wine still difficult to use

[chevy]

I tried Wine on my new machine. ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwine/ )

I was able to install 1997 version of Works, but not to upgrade it to Office 97. And the install is cumbersome. Not yet ready for real usage on Macos.

[Viro]

The Wine project is never ever going to be "production" ready. The reason for that is because it is trying to reverse engineer the Windows API, and this isn't a trivial task as the API specification is constantly changing, as Microsoft adds new functionality to its existing libraries.

A much better approach would be emulation/virtualization, where you actually emulate/virtualize a PC (which is much easier) than trying to implement the entire Windows API.

[Captain Code]

And just as they get close to finishing the API for XP, out comes Vista!

[symphonix]

The Wine project has had some success with allowing some programs to be quickly ported to Unix/MacOSX, though. For instance, the Mac and Linux versions of Lotus Notes are actually compiled from the Windows code with Wine libraries added in.

However, as Viro says, Wine will never be a real, production ready and stable method of emulation since the project is based on trying to emulate the behaviour of Windows' APIs without actually having the code or documentation for them. It would be like building a car knowing only what it looks like from the outside.