> I really fear that this will end up with vendors loudly advertising linux > support and > proudly putting linux stickers on their products where everything you find > inside are just > the same windows .exe files and a readme stating that these will work fine > with wine. > Which at least is not what I would like to see. I agree. :) > > The main thing the _developers_ should be pointed to(if they care about their > product on > other platforms then windows) are some decent docs about platform-independent > programming :p Yes, they should. I think developers think about abstracting their development around cross-platform toolkits like Gtk or QT But, then again, far too many developers don't now, and probably won't ever. So what then? > > Maybe it's just me but when reading all this I got the feeling that writing > windows > applications(which work with wine) is just *the* way to go. > Why the hell are we running linux then? I agree here too. Maybe this is slightly off topic in this thread, but I still have some concerns about wine's ability to run apps. Right now, development of wine is centered around getting certain apps to work. Not to mention, I also think that Wine doesn't have a big enough developer base to really address that. Windows is a *gargantuan* piece of software. Over Wine's lifetime there have been about 800 contributors with about 40 active now. I really don't think that's enough to get Wine where it needs to go, especially if we want to market ourselves as a porting solution. > > Not that I generally disagree with what you wrote. Actually it's mostly > totally fine.And > it's definitly a good thing when vendors care about their product running > with wine or > companies migrating to linux trying to get their highly-specialized-app to > work with wine. > But imho it _shouldn't_ be the long term solution. Yes, the site that Dan put together is pretty good. It's got lots of good info. But put yourself in the ISV's shoes. If I had some big commercial product I wanted to port, would I want to use a known unstable platform, that may or may not work, to do it with?
Not that I mean to sound like a pessimist, but I'm really just calling it as I see it. No offense to anyone intended. :)
