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RachelFyesterday at 9:18 PM3 repliesview on HN

It is a superb project, and a hard thing to do.

It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.


Replies

coldpieyesterday at 9:41 PM

> It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.

Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. MS Office is using every single corner of Windows: every feature in the XML libraries, tons of .NET type stuff, all the OLE and COM and typelib and compound storage features, tons of Explorer integrations, auto-updating stuff via Windows patching mechanisms... there's almost no corner of the Windows OS that MS Office doesn't use.

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codebjeyesterday at 11:22 PM

Steam and CodeWeavers contribute a lot of code to the Wine project, because it underpins their business models of supporting Windows games on non-Windows platforms.

Between them they make up the vast bulk of what actually gets attention and improvement in Wine, and neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.

philipwhiukyesterday at 10:35 PM

I don't know that they are. It's just there's more incentive to port stuff that has no direct alternative.