[giancarlostoro]

Linux is free and less wasteful on resources on the other hand.

[vunderba]

It is, and if you can switch, it’s highly recommended. I have some pretty bespoke old RS-232 Windows software that was an absolute disaster to get working under Debian with Wine a few years back, so I (and others) might still need to keep a copy of Windows around.

[AyanamiKaine]

Unironically, I had the most success with old windows programs not when using wine directly but using proton with steam. I personally use umu[1] to use proton without directly needing to run steam. I wrote a small KDE script for .exe files so I can just double click them and they run lol. Or for setups I can right click them and just install them as a setup and it automatically creates a app shortcut I can open.

[1]https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher

[d3Xt3r]

Got a link to the script?

[AyanamiKaine]

Yes! I do here [1]. But keep in mind I am using NixOS and so it looks a bit weird. You should be able to just copy paste the script part and it should work when you have umu at path.

[1] https://pastebin.com/JRaK4uRV

[ihalip]

Might want to try again, Wine progressed a lot in the past couple years.

[thangalin]

It works well, though its messages could use some TLC:

    libEGL warning: pci id for fd 31: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)

    pci id for fd 33: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)
    pci id for fd 34: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)
    libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
    libEGL warning: pci id for fd 31: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)

    pci id for fd 33: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)
    pci id for fd 34: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)
    libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
    libEGL warning: pci id for fd 31: 10de:1ff0, driver (null)

    0124:fixme:nls:RtlGetThreadPreferredUILanguages 00000034, 0313F66C, 0313F6DC 0313F674
    0124:fixme:nls:get_dummy_preferred_ui_language (0x34 0x1009 0313F66C 0313F6DC 0313F674) returning a dummy value (current locale)
    0124:fixme:heap:RtlSetHeapInformation HEAP_INFORMATION_CLASS 1 not implemented!
    0124:fixme:nls:RtlGetThreadPreferredUILanguages 00000034, 0313F9D4, 0313FA44 0313F9DC
    0124:fixme:nls:get_dummy_preferred_ui_language (0x34 0x1009 0313F9D4 0313FA44 0313F9DC) returning a dummy value (current locale)
    0124:fixme:shell:InitNetworkAddressControl stub
    0124:fixme:richedit:editor_handle_message EM_GETLANGOPTIONS: stub
    0124:fixme:richedit:editor_handle_message EM_SETLANGOPTIONS: stub
    0124:fixme:ntdll:NtQuerySystemInformation info_class SYSTEM_PERFORMANCE_INFORMATION
    0124:fixme:win:RegisterTouchWindow hwnd 000100E0, flags 0 stub!
    0124:fixme:msvcrt:__clean_type_info_names_internal (7853A300) stub
    0124:fixme:msvcrt:__clean_type_info_names_internal (7B4F6BE4) stub
    0124:fixme:msvcrt:__clean_type_info_names_internal (79410E54) stub

[dokyun]

wine whatever.exe 2>/dev/null

[x______________]

> Might want to try again, Wine progressed a lot in the past couple years.

You could even go as far as suggesting SteamOS once they release the OS to more devices. Gaming themed sure but it's a flavor of Arch and you have full control over what gets installed.

[sharts]

VMs were not an option?

[f-az]

Can’t wait till Fable 6 can just decompile and reimplement old software like that.

[Filligree]

Great for the americans. What are the rest of us going to do?

[lukan]

Use the distilled chinese models.

[farnsworthfusor]

Try Opus 4.8? It's just a language translation task. LLMs should be good at it.

[SirMaster]

Maybe get your governments and citizens to innovate and create their own instead of relying so heavily on other countries. I thought that's the direction other countries were trying to go.

[nairboon]

Good thing that the US frontier labs only download data from the US internet created by US citizens /s

[hypfer]

At this point, you might want to consider throwing an LLM at it and just letting it reimplement the thing so that it runs on linux.

They can actually do that. They may not like it, but they can.

[LtWorf]

Reverse engineer a binary proprietary database format? I have some doubts.

[hypfer]

Why?

Certainly not unattended, but no AI should ever be unattended.

But if you closely guide it, support it with tools like Ghidra and force force force force force a process with many sanity checks and quintuple-checks, it's possible.

What previously needed a whole team and months might be one guy, a lot of tokens and 1-3 weeks. Doable, fun, and interesting.

__

Judging by the downvotes, I guess people mistook the initial comment for HN VC fueled AI delusions and I can't blame them for that. That's not what it was tho.

[1kurac]

I don't know... laptop-mode and all, my battery runs out pretty quickly.

[ptero]

This. Linux is my primary OS for both work and home, but I have a Mac laptop for travel as the battery life of any Linux laptop I tried is very bad. And this includes a modern System 76, supposedly Linux-friendly with drivers, which drains the battery on fairly light workloads in about 2 hours. My 2c.

[detritus]

Out of interest, what value do you think that a comment like that has, in a forum such as this? You're not likely to be informing people with information they're not already abundantly aware of.

Whereas the person you're responding to is adding value, for me at least. I am in what might be an edge-case position where I need to run software specific to Windows and, much more importantly run hardware that uses drivers which seemingly don't work on Windows 11 (I only learnt recently, whilst planning to finally 'upgrade').

I couldn't even begin to do what I do, ably and competently at least, in a Linux environment.

And I've had at least one laptop for general use running some flavour of Linux for about 16 years now.

[giancarlostoro]

Maybe not you, but many times I am asked what my setup looks like, because I game on Linux which is not as problematic as it used to be in the 2000s.

[kazinator]

Unless it's some Microsoft version of Linux, of course, in which every keystroke you type performs a docker run ... or whatever.