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Linux plays windows games faster than windows

150 points posted to Linux by steveoc 04/11/07

Review of the latest release of Cedega 6.0 by Phoronix

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=681&num=1< the same windows-binary game, WinXP vs Wine on linux shows them neck and neck, with wine often providing better performance than WinXP.

Vista trails both of them by an obvious margin.

WINE / Cedega is an open source clean room implentation of the entire windows API under linux. It allows windows binaries (include games that use DirectX) to run natively under linux without emulation.

The code in Wine has been tweaked and improved vastly over the years, and will continue to improve at an excellent pace. Its now got to the point where its a better Windows than Windows in many situations .. and Wine is only a subset of everything else you get in Linux. Wine is totally free, totally open source, and does not require that you buy any Microsoft licenses.

Thanks to the way that linux is secure by default, running Windows binaries under linux does not expose you to the miriad numbers of Windows viruses.

People who are stuck with Windows because they believe they 'need windows' to play games, can think again.

steve2
04/12/07		 1) Wine slowly moves to GPL and offshoots like Cedega will soon fall behind the mainline (and become pointless, since directx support for main wine develops rapidly)
2.) Of course Wine can run viruses just like other windows software. The setup can be done in a way, that greatly limits potential damage (it can run without root privileges, it can create environments with limited drive access, ...), but generally it is NOT safe from Windows viruses.
steveoc
04/12/07		 (on wine viruses) True up to a point ...

You can of course execute a virus binary and have it run, but it cant do anything useful .. the virus cannot install itself as a service, and the virus cannot take advantage of buffer overflows at known memory locations with known-vunerable system DLL's .. since the DLL's that it is targetting are completely different implementations. It can only write to the disk portion which is in a nice clean sandbox under the (line) user's wine subdirectory.

Once the program being executed via wine terminates, then the whole environment (in which the virus expects to be running) also terminates. So .. Im confident saying that a virus running through wine cannot do any real damage, and certainly cannot install any sort of spyware in the same way that it can on a genuine windows install. Its not technically possible.

It _would_ be feasible to build a windows executable with a 'linux specific virus' in it, that understood the underlying enviroment that it was executing in, and was able to save itself to dis, but it would have to be targetted at a specific machine.. It would also be extremely difficult to make that same virus be able to replicate, attach itself to another program, or install something else that could run hidden in the background. It would be impossible for it to create something to ran undetected in fact.

Interesting notion though, anyone care to elaborate ?
johnyaus
04/12/07		 When there is a game available. Pacman from atari...
It does not even have a faster web browser ! Try to open a page in Linux and in Vista. It takes 6 times more to open the browser in linux and 3 times to open the page. That should be the expected, since you are getting the software for free.
ferose2
04/13/07		 johnyaus did you ever use linux?
premcv
07/31/07		 Nope, didn't think so!
 
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