Wine usability
Wine has some outstanding usability issues. This page serves as a way to catalog what they are, who is working on them, and how we can fix them.
OpenGL
A lot of users attempt to run various programs in Wine before having OpenGL fully configured on their system, generally as a result of lacking proprietary NVidia drivers. It would be nice if Wine warned the user that DirectRendering was not working when running an OpenGL application, along with a suggestion to install drivers.
Menu Entries
Currently Wine creates menu entries akin to the Windows start menu, however a few important items are lacking that most users aren't even aware exist until being told otherwise. Among these are winecfg, wine's uninstaller, and a link to browse Wine's virtual windows drive (ie, open up a ~/.wine/drive_c/ window in the file manager).
This can be fixed at the package level. The Ubuntu packages for Gutsy, for instance, include a few .desktop files to make this easier.
MSI Files
Currently, in order to install an MSI file (eg steam), most users have to open a terminal, navigate to where it is, and run wine msiexec /i installer.msi. This should be doable just by double clicking, like it is in Windows.
Perhaps the best solution is for packagers to create a launcher script of sorts.
Fonts
Several fonts (notably Tahoma for steam) are not included. Wine also lacks aliases for these fonts - the result is blank text in an application, and requiring the user to install the font by hand.
Possible solutions:
- Including an alias for Tahoma in Wine. The problem is that using a very wrong font (especially one with a different width) may result in crashes.
Having Wine packages depend on a package containing tahoma at the distribution level. In Ubuntu and Debian, Tahoma is not currently included in the msttcorefonts package - see this bug. Unfortunately, these packages cannot have the same license as Wine, so the addition of an alias is probably best too.
Done as of 0.9.47 Having a completely free version of Tahoma made, such as with Red Hat's freely licensed "Liberation" fonts.
Are there any other fonts we need?
winecfg
It has been suggested that winecfg's application tab be refactored in such a way to make it more intuitive. It is not always clear to new users that the selected application is linked to other tabs and not just for setting the Windows version (despite the descriptive text above the list box, and the title bar changing). See Bug 6233 and Bug 12441.