The Wine folks have done a lot of excellent work, but these two applications are not simple to run under it. Quickbooks has so many hooks to other programs, I can understand why it works so poorly. And there are still a few bugs in MS Access where doing the wrong thing can crash — popping up help or entering some characters in the VBA editor kills it for me.

When you’re talking about business apps that hold the lifeblood of your business, it’s downright scary to have it become dodgy because you’re working on a different operating system. And at the point you find that out, you’re probably still a noob. Ubuntu goes in the trashcan.

It’s a shame, because IBM has the ability to develop native alternatives to these two programs. In fact, many of the building blocks have already been developed (mdbtools, SQL-Ledger). But there are lots of pieces missing from the equation, especially help with a transition.

I’m not sure any amount of work on Wine could make Linux a drop-in replacement for Windows, to people who’ve grown dependent on specific Windows apps. There will always be something that needs more work, so for people who are that dependent it will always be an inferior solution. Sort of like how OpenOffice is just “a Free / Open-Source Microsoft Office.” They’re even more boring and even less usable, and I can’t think of any features they’ve got over MS.

Personally, I use Linux Mint because it’s better in every way than Windows. Every way, that is, except compatibility … and that’s where Wine comes in, helping to take the sting out of the transition. You’ve let me play my old games and install obscure Windows games that my friends wanted to play, and apps that I need that only run in Windows. And for that I thank you.

Wine has helped ease my transition to a superior platform. Sorry that IBM’s ignoring you people … I’m grateful to you and I wish you luck.

There are lots of open source apps that are trying to be free versions of commercials apps. Open Office is a good example: it shares much of its look and feel with previous versions of Microsoft Office. But it’s still a pretty crappy app. In my experience, it crashes, it’s missing major pieces of functionality, and it has lots of subtle bugs that regularly bite users.

But it’s a drop-in replacement. It looks the same as MS office. It kinda feels the same as MS office. And it regularly fails most use cases.

Instead of producing clone-ware, the Sun/Oracle/Star-Office peeps should have spent time making a usable, stable, secure, reliable, performant app, with some novel features thrown in.

(Yes, I’m posting from an IBM IP addy. I’m an IBM employee, but I’m not posting in that capacity. I don’t know who Sutor is, and I have nothing to do with IBM’s OS strategy. I’ve been using some flavour of linux for much longer than I’ve worked for Big Blue.)

I came across that recently, but not yet had time to evaluate it…