Wine

Expanding on the Wine talk, why don't we discuss why Wine is useful. Well, I personally know that it's making my transition much easier. There are tons of free and open-source programs available for Linux, and in this case, that may be working both for and against me. Given the vast amount of Linux software, I'm bound to find a program that's suitably equivalent to the programs I formerly used on Windows; but at the same time, it may take me a while to finally find that program. Until I do find these alternatives, Wine may allow you to use your Windows programs either indefinitely, or until you come across a Linux-based one. Currently, that's what I'm doing with a few programs. As I mentioned before I use both HashX and (to a lesser extent) Easy Duplicate Finder. In addition, I use Bulk Rename Utility, which as the name suggests, allows me to easily rename several files at once. I understand that there's Métamorphose, but I haven't tried that yet. Now I don't necessarily use these just because I'm used to them or haven't found a Linux-equivalent; in some cases, the Linux equivalents are inferior to their Window counterparts. For example, I feel that the free Paint.NET is superior to GIMP, even if GIMP has many more features—mostly it's because Paint.NET has an easier-to-use interface. It has one window, with four others (toolbox, color editor, history, and layer manager) inside it, vs. GIMP's multi-window configuration. But also, tools in Paint.NET are more intuitive, and thus easier, to use. You select a tool from the toolbox—say the selection tool—and the more refined settings for that tool appear on the top toolbar. There, I can easily decide whether to replace an existing selection area with a new one, add a selection to an existing one, subtract a selection area from an existing one, etc. Unfortunately, as the name implies, Paint.NET is reliant upon Microsoft's .NET architecture, which makes it more difficult than usual to port the program to Linux. As of now, all I now is that some have worked on a version of Paint.NET for Linux that uses Mono in place of .NET, with decent, but not preferable, results. As such, I'm stuck with GIMP (in Linux, anyway), and will be for the foreseeable future :( I really hope that GIMP's development team can fix GIMP's interface enough that it's less reliant on menus and generally more like Paint.NET's—for the end-user's sake, you know? So Wine doesn't work with every Windows program out there, but with time and/or luck, your favorite Windows program may work well with it. Wine's website, , maintains a database of programs and their status (i.e., whether they work or not), so you can use that resource to find out whether others have been successful in using a certain program with Wine. Of course, the database may contain outdated information, and also it wouldn't be uncommon for your specific program to not be listed, so you can always try the program yourself. Good luck :)

Windows Programs, Their Extensions, and Wine

Some people feel that Windows should just die. And its little programs too. Others, however, rely on certain “exclusive” Windows programs, whether it's because of their employer or their own personal taste. While I personally look forward to going completely Linux, there are still a few programs in Windows that I feel are superior to current Linux alternatives. For those, I must run them with the help of Wine (or a virtual machine, but that's beyond this article), a program (that's not an emulator) that allows you to run many Windows programs within Linux. Now, given the fact that there are so many programs exclusively on Windows, your obscure tax form application most likely won't be supported in Wine. Many of those programs are so tied to the Windows way of doing things that the more complex ones most likely won't be compatible. I personally have had some success with some of the smaller programs I used pretty extensively in Windows. HashX, a program I use to compare files I download to the originals, ensuring that I received the file intact and as the author intended; and Easy Duplicate Finder, a program that helps identify any duplicate files I may have so that I can delete them (although FSLint, for Linux, seems to have a decent duplicate finder component as well), are two examples.

One thing I noticed, though, was that when I double-clicked on one of the programs running with Wine, I would get a pop-up message stating that the content of the file didn't match its extension (.exe). As a result, I had to manually right-click the file and choose to run it with Wine in order to use it. This was pretty annoying. Thankfully, the fix was easy: all I had to do was rename the files by deleting the “.exe” part, and then I was successfully able to run them by double-clicking.

One of the many things I like about Ubuntu is that it doesn't necessarily need a file to have an extension to function—rather, it simply looks at the file content to determine which application should open it. For instance, a simple text file named “README” would open up just fine in gedit (or your preferred text editor) under Ubuntu, but it would choke up Windows, and you'd be required to add a file extension in order to use it (unless you right-clicked the file and manually opened it with a specific program). So it looks like the concept works similarly for Wine-driven programs, with the difference that you pretty much must remove the file extension if you want to be able to run a program by simply double-clicking it.