wine vs. virtualization

Been talking about making the jump from a Windows OS machine for some time now and am inching closer and closer to actually doing it.

There are going to be some apps (games, specialized programs, MS Office for a macro) that need some sort of Windows capability.

I’m going to be using wine and/or some sort of virtualization. I know that wine is needed for 3d video (games). If I have wine going, why would I also want to think about virtualization? Maybe wine is all I’ll need.

Thanks!

You might find that (like many of us) you need/want both. I use WINE to play Counter-Strike and CS:Source, but I also have an XP VM in VMware that I fire up occasionally as well.

The best way to find out if your applications will work with wine is search for them in the application database at Wine HQ - that should give you some idea if they will work or not, as well as if there is a lot of work involved in getting them to work, or if the install/config is pretty straight-forward.

If MS office and/or Photoshop are applications you need to run, you might want to look at CodeWeavers Crossover Office for Linux - it’s not a “free” application, but it does work very well, and differs from straight WINE in that it can seperate your Windows applications into seperate “bottles” so that they don’t interfere with each other, and you can set different “windows versions” to different bottles as well.

HTH.