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Raven - A Windows your apps recognize. (useraven.org)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] 3 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

    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 exe files 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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    That never seems to work with wine

    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.

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