Almost every regular desktop Linux user I know keeps a virtual machine with an old version of Windows around. I’m included in this group, I still run Windows XP in a VM, and will until it no longer works or the need for it is gone. I expect that the need will be the first to go, as the Windows only applications that I use are migrating off to web apps, like the latest release of VMware’s Vcenter server. This personal, anecdotal evidence is what I see as the final failure of the Wine project. Wine promised us the ability to run Windows applications on Linux, but in my experience very few actually do.
I ran across Jim Lynch’s article in IT World titled Wine and Windows RT: What’s the Point? where he argues that porting Windows RT applications to run natively on Linux is a waste of time:
Is it me or is this just a huge waste of developer time? Windows RT devices aren’t selling well at all, it seems to be yet another gigantic bomb from Microsoft. So why waste the time and effort to support it in the first place?
