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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • Is Wine an emulator? There seems to be disagreement

    There is a lot of confusion about this, particularly caused by people getting Wine’s name wrong and calling it WINdows Emulator.

    When users think of an emulator, they tend to think of things like game console emulators or virtualization software. However, Wine is a compatibility layer - it runs Windows applications in much the same way Windows does. There is no inherent loss of speed due to “emulation” when using Wine, nor is there a need to open Wine before running your application.

    That said, Wine can be thought of as a Windows emulator in much the same way that Windows Vista can be thought of as a Windows XP emulator: both allow you to run the same applications by translating system calls in much the same way. Setting Wine to mimic Windows XP is not much different from setting Vista to launch an application in XP compatibility mode.

    A few things make Wine more than just an emulator:

    Sections of Wine can be used on Windows. Some virtual machines use Wine’s OpenGL-based implementation of Direct3D on Windows rather than truly emulate 3D hardware. Winelib can be used for porting Windows application source code to other operating systems that Wine supports to run on any processor, even processors that Windows itself does not support. “Wine is not just an emulator” is more accurate. Thinking of Wine as just an emulator is really forgetting about the other things it is. Wine’s “emulator” is really just a binary loader that allows Windows applications to interface with the Wine API replacement.

    https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ






  • Saw something on programming.dev about some extra telemetry Windows 11 was adding or something like that? I forget. It was definitely something I think is bad, that people on programming.dev also think is bad. Then, despite having done registry edits and everything else I could think of to turn off auto Windows updates to make sure I would not get the bad new feature added in an update, my Windows 11 computer auto updated anyways. Got mad, wanted to switch to Linux, asked [email protected] for help, and finally did it four months later, a few days before the new year started.


  • Alright, I went and installed Linux! I honestly have not looked at most of those resources since I made the post but I plan to as needed—the thing that I took was a user’s advice on which distribution (Nobara) for my specific use case. In case we have the same use case: I was replacing a Windows computer that I only used for video games (none of which are online multiplayer games or have anticheat, sometimes those might be incompatible with a Linux install?) and BOINC/Folding at Home. If I hate it or have too much trouble I’ll try another distribution.

    One thing I can tell you is a couple things I learned during the installation process. Only later did I find https://www.howtogeek.com/693588/how-to-install-linux/ which would have helped me hit less bumps in the road. (Mainly because I was looking at https://wiki.nobaraproject.org/ and saw the two steps about downloading ISO and creating a usable USB device. I already had the ISO, so I moved onto creating a bootable USB device on my own and failed at that. Ended up finding the howtogeek guide which helped me with the USB device later.)

    • I am an idiot who thought doing https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-essentials/install/create-a-bootable-usb-flash-drive dumping the ISO on a flashdrive was enough before reading that howtogeek guide. It is not. I learned the hard way I had to use https://rufus.ie/en/ on the ISO (if you’re smarter than me you can figure out what that actually does to make it bootable lol). That linked tutorial does work though.
    • Because I was migrating from a Windows 11 machine, I needed the flashdrive in fat32 so UEFI could read it, not NFTS.
    • Finally, I got “the volume is too big for fat32” or something like that when trying to format to fat32. I tried to look up if I could just make a smaller partition on my flashdrive that was fat32, no answer found. So I just did it. Yes, you can indeed just make a smaller fat32 partition that is big enough to hold your Linux install.