Raven runs Windows applications on Linux. You install them with their own installers, the same ones you would use on a PC, and they start: no virtual machine, no winetricks, no DLL overrides.
Raven runs Windows applications on Linux. You install them with their own installers, the same ones you would use on a PC, and they start: no virtual machine, no winetricks, no DLL overrides.
How is this different than what wine does though? Looks like it implements the windows apis, just like wine. It was originally implemented in go, with a C++ rewrite started July 31st the original go implementation was removed three days ago .
By all means, wine is a huge project, probably with a lot of baggage. I’m not pro AI, but I guess translating between apis could be something language models could be good at. Looks pretty sloppy though.
Edit: based on some twitter posts by the author, looks like the conceptual approach is an NT kernel shim running in user space rather than translating api calls directly. gVisor was mentioned as doing something similar
This sounds like I can just double click an exe like I do on windows and it’ll work. That never seems to work with wine so it’ll be nice to have something function properly.
Wine has nothing to do with double clicking. You can set up your desktop environment to do this if you want. Wine requires environments to run apps (aka wine prefixes), and the way I do it is I reuse one environment as much as I can.
Nowadays, I just reuse the wine prefixes Heroic creates, since it usually installs a good chunk of dependencies. Lazy, but it works and saves disk space.
Yeah if you read my other reply I meant it as it often just fails silently with wine, I’ll open an exe, it’ll do something in the background, and then nothing happens. No errors, no explanation of what went wrong…
You still need to run the exe through raven. Though you can do that (and it’s also possible with wine already) by having the runner assotiated with
exefiles in your file browser. Normally with wine it’s already the case that you can double click on the exe from there and have it launch.When they say “run directly in the CPU” what they mean is that it’s not a VM… but this was already true of wine too.
My understanding is that they are replacing the windows kernel (with help of ReactOS code) and asking you to install official Microsoft libraries into a separate runtime environment… so it’s similar to a VM in the sense that it’s running a different kernel with its own runtime, but at the same time not a VM because it’s not emulating the hardware level… it’s a lower level than wine but a higher level than a VM.
I feel this can potentially be more of a moving target (since it depends on Microsoft not changing the lower level ABI used in future versions of the libraries) and less legally-safe (you need to agree to MS terms when you install their libraries… at any time they can change them and say you cannot do this).
Wine instead implements higher level APIs, which MS is incentivized to keep stable, since changes at that level would also break compatibility with programs (and in some cases, Wine’s API is actually more compatible with Windows software than modern versions of Windows that have dropped older APIs).
Plus… it necessarily relies in closed source software (the MS libraries) to run… so I’d argue it’s less free than wine.
It’s more that wine tries but often fails silently for some reason, hopefully this is more user friendly and will actually just tell me “you need .net framework click here to install” and that sort of thing.
Well, it’s still early, so we won’t know yet how friendly, robust / stable and compatible it will be. I expect not every program will work regardless of whether you have installed the right version of the libraries or not. In the tests they are doing they say VLC for example is not starting up.
I also think that the stats showing it running better than Wine might be a bit premature too… it’s not impossible for the performance to get worse when more gets implemented in order to have wider support. But we’ll see, maybe it does result in a better approach.