I was just going to post up a topic about this very same thing, ironically enough, until i found this topic. Hope it's not reviving it too much. ;p



But I just felt like trying WINE out on lots of my windoze programs just to see how they run, and i'll have to say that it's gotten a *whole* lot better. Jazz runs just about perfectly (except i don't seem to get any sound...maybe just a random bug in my version of WINE) the speed is also pretty good, even comparable to windoze.



As for you, Monolith, Microsoft should die ;p. How can you actually trust windoze to run stuff like a webserver? Crazy. ;p



But if you really need you windoze apps, there's a couple of wars, commercial and not, to get them. I think if you really need IE and simple, non graphical programs in windoze, there's one that's extremely fast and works pretty well. It's called Win4Lin by Netraverse. I also used version 2, but apparently version 3 is out, so it might've gotten even better. The really interesting part about this prog is that you actually install windoze into a virtual drive (a file) and when you run the program, it's like you're actually in windoze itself, and it has all the cheeseyness and crappiness you need in a resize-able window. ;p



WINE, of course, would probably be used for something more graphical that win4lin can't emulate. It's been getting a whole lot better, but of course, it can only do a few games, and prolly most of them 2D.



VMWare is commercial, and i've heard that it emulates everything perfectly, but at half speed. Basically, if you have an 800MHz, it'll run like a 400MHz. At least that's what they claim, but at the time i ran it, my PC was so slow i couldn't really tell if that was half-speed or not ;p. I've never tried games with it, although it'd be interesting to see what 3D does in it.



But most importantly, the *ONLY* reason you'd need winblows is for the game market; there's not too much else they have. For browsers, sure we have a less then adaquate Netscape, and a medicore Mozilla, but if anyone's ever tried Konqueror, it's pretty good. It does a lot of the stuff IE does, and just the look and feel reminds me of IE.



~cheeze