Wine 9.8 Fixes Nearly 20 Year Old Bug For Installing Microsoft Office 97

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine 9.8 Fixes Nearly 20 Year Old Bug For Installing Microsoft Office 97

Wine 9.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux / Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-9.8-Released

[schmidtbag]

I have a hard time understanding why the fix for stdole32.tlb was even bothered with. Is anything else affected by it? What was the motivation for it?

[sophisticles]

This is exactly why I keep saying that if you want to run Windows software, use Windows.

I have been running a dual boot for decades, since Win 2k was released when I first dual booted it with Red Hat.

There are very few reasons to use an emulator, even that claims it is not.

WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator

[andyprough]

This is exactly why I keep saying that if you want to run Windows software, use Windows.

I have been running a dual boot for decades, since Win 2k was released when I first dual booted it with Red Hat.

There are very few reasons to use an emulator, even that claims it is not.

WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator

Why would you run a dual boot? What a complete waste of time. And you are just doubling your security vulnerability exposures by running your bare metal with both. Just run one or the other in a VM. And try to not let the guest OS connect to anything in the outside world.

[aufkrawall]

And try to not let the guest OS connect to anything in the outside world.

The outside world is evil. Linux desktop user mentality in a nutshell.

[Daktyl198]

I have a hard time understanding why the fix for stdole32.tlb was even bothered with. Is anything else affected by it? What was the motivation for it?

Somebody found an old bug that seemed easy enough to fix, and used it to get familiar with the wine codebase and the processes necessary to contribute to it. Basically an entry bug.

[zexelon]

This is exactly why I keep saying that if you want to run Windows software, use Windows.

I have been running a dual boot for decades, since Win 2k was released when I first dual booted it with Red Hat.

There are very few reasons to use an emulator, even that claims it is not.

WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator

Why?? Dual booting consumes hard drive space inefficiently and is generally a huge pain. If you need Windows (say for a real CAD package) run it in a VM with GPU pass through. Outside of that for gaming, Proton is basically amazing. Sure there are one or two games worth playing on windows still (warzone if you like) but again run it in the VM with a GPU.

[rmfx]

I have a hard time understanding why the fix for stdole32.tlb was even bothered with. Is anything else affected by it? What was the motivation for it?

Complaining at bug fixes now… Some people just can’t be simply grateful.

[moonwalker]

Why?? Dual booting consumes hard drive space inefficiently and is generally a huge pain. If you need Windows (say for a real CAD package) run it in a VM with GPU pass through. Outside of that for gaming, Proton is basically amazing. Sure there are one or two games worth playing on windows still (warzone if you like) but again run it in the VM with a GPU.

I actually used to develop a Windows app like that, in a Windows guest within Linux host. In my benchmarks the app (written mostly in C++) was actually building faster that way than in bare metal Windows on the very same laptop, thanks to Linux host caching all the I/O. I seem to remember seeing someone else benchmarking I/O in Windows running bare metal vs as a VM on Linux with similar results, just instead of building a bunch of C/C++ code I think they were using databases.

[rabcor]

I have a hard time understanding why the fix for stdole32.tlb was even bothered with. Is anything else affected by it? What was the motivation for it?

We don't know, but a thousand fixes like this one more and some things that currently don't work on wine will probably magically start working.