Wine Linux Alternatives to Windows Applications
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If you're looking to give a try at Wine Linux and come from the Windows world, two of your questions certainly are: can I use a Windows application in Linux ? Is there a Linux alternative to this Windows software ? This article will try to answer these questions by presenting Linux alternatives to popular Windows applications.
First of all, you must know that your Windows applications will not work under Linux unless you use an emulator or some kind of compatibility layer. There's some Windows emulators under Linux, Wine Linux being the best known of them, than can allow you to run Windows applications. However, results with these emulators are more or less acceptable. Many applications, if not most, will simply not work at all with them. And those that work may not be 100% percent operational, some features being disabled. And in all cases, it may requires hours of tweaking and configuration testings to make things work (but you may be lucky and everything may work at the first try). In short, if you need to run Windows applications, you're far better to have a dual boot system with Windows and Linux than try to run Windows software under Linux... If you want an application to be ported to Linux, the best you can do is to write an email to the developers asking them to port the software. If nobody asks Linux software, developers will continue to write Windows-only applications, thinking that there's no demand for Linux products or that peoples are happy with emulators.
That said, there's a lot of Linux applications that are equivalent or better than the ones you already have under Windows. Alternatives to the most popular Windows applications will now be presented. If you plan to install Mandrake Linux, is good to know that most of these software are included with the system and installed by default. So, you don't have to download and install everything: it's all ready to use after Mandrake installation!
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