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.
The thing I’ll be interested to see is more what type of software support this will have in reality. Benchmarks might be good, but if it has the same issues Wine has (you have to look up which versions are compatible and change these settings and download these .net runtimes or whatever to get one app to work) then it really just isn’t worth it. I have a Windows virtual machine and I can run any EXE I need to on it, which isn’t many, usually just for testing Windows applications I need to test out. The thing that is most annoying for me isn’t necessarily performance, just the fact I need to change Wine settings for every app I install. I really hope this takes off, but I also hope it is better than Wine not just in performance, but also in simplicity.
Thankfully there really aren’t any windows (only) applications worth running. So no need.
I use eg ShareX and Irfanview, only two examples of a lot of apps for Windows only, superior to anything from Linux alternatives, for Gamers (despite there are changings in last years) there are also only an limited catalogue for Linux in comparision (even worse in Mac), same also in the case of official and professional apps. Windows has the biggest catalogue of software of all other OS (even FOSS), don’t confuse it. The strong and advantage of Linux is other, but not respect the list of high quality soft. This in the future may change, but currently Windows is the, by far most used OS and because of this, also the most devs of soft for it. So an good working Windows emulator for Linux isn’t a bad idea and for sure usefull for a lot of users.
I don’t think either Sharex or Irfanview are superior to the alternatives. What is one thing that you can do with Irfanview that I can’t do elsewhere? I am familiar with the program, its ok for what it is.
You need several different apps to do the same as Irfanview. Yes, there are several image viewer for Linux, also multimedia viewer, image editors, batch converters, etc., but not all in one like Irfanview. Same for ShareX, there is no other with editor, screenshot, screencast, OCR, of any type of files, uploader customizable and more. The nearest alternative is Greenshot, but also not for Linux, only for Windows and Mac. It is a fact, most soft for Linux exist also for Windows, not the other way arround.
You need several different apps to do the same as Irfanview.
Why would I want an all in one? Wouldn’t I want ones that are the best at what they do, but can hand off functionality to other programs if they excel at it? I just don’t find the case for it compelling at all. From any viewer in linux I can launch others applications or have complex workflows.
As for ShareX: Spectacle (default in KDE) covers the capture end (snips, ocr, edit, etc), and then of course uploading is simple enough with various tools. Automation is easy.
Although I gotta give ShareX some love. I used to use it at work, it was great at the time. Being open source made it even better.
Spectacle is nice but if I haven’t restarted the PC for a few days, it takes about a minute to react to the hotkey
Yes, Spectacle is a screenshot tool, but also not more than this, equivalent of the by default inbuild one in Windows (Snipping Tool, screenshot/cast, annotation…), which do more or less the same. better other tools like Flameshot (Windows, Linux, Mac), etc.but not a real alternative to ShareX.
“no virtual machine”
look inside:
“A virtual machine boots a guest operating system…”
The full context of the paragraph, which is important here:
A virtual machine boots a guest operating system. Raven instead implements Windows interfaces through these guest components and supervisor services. Wine also implements Windows interfaces; the distinction here is how Raven divides that work and supervises the guest, rather than whether system libraries exist inside the application’s process.
I’m not entirely understanding this, but it sounds like a hybrid concept between WINE and a virtual machine. So its only partially virtualized.
It is worded funny, but it actually says what a virtual machine does first, and then contrasts it to what Raven does which is different:
“Raven runs the .exe directly on the CPU in a supervised guest process. […]”
How is this different than what wine does though? Looks like it implements the windows apis, just like wine. It was originally implemented in go, with a C++ rewrite started July 31st the original go implementation was removed three days ago .
By all means, wine is a huge project, probably with a lot of baggage. I’m not pro AI, but I guess translating between apis could be something language models could be good at. Looks pretty sloppy though.
Edit: based on some twitter posts by the author, looks like the conceptual approach is an NT kernel shim running in user space rather than translating api calls directly. gVisor was mentioned as doing something similar
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.
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.
Yeah if you read my other reply I meant it as it often just fails silently with wine, I’ll open an exe, it’ll do something in the background, and then nothing happens. No errors, no explanation of what went wrong…
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
exefiles 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.
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.
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.
I have a couple of programs that refused to run through wine, I’m going to try them with this and see how legit it is.
Any news?
Any programs that interact with hardware won’t work still. Like the 8bitdo app and asrock led thingy for my gpu.
There’s ways around that with wine isn’t there?
Not that I know of. I’ve tried with multiple wine and proton versions and some apps just never work. They install and launch but they can’t do anything to the hardware
Tried that web page on a few repos, and all it does is check for co-authorship in commit messages. The raven repo started including the assisted by tag three days ago, but the repo itself was created about a year ago. I wouldn’t rely on that page for anything useful.
That said, looking through the codebase and commits a bit, I wouldn’t be surprised that LLMs has been used longer than that.
The repo has regular commits at least a year back in time. There are a lot of commits lately with “assistance“ from AI, though. But it doesn’t look anything like “3-day slop” to me.
deleted by creator
If this is so good, why is it the first time I see it?
What’s the catch?
It’s really new.
It’s by the creator of Bottles btw.
Ah - that changes the perspective a bit, I’ll have to check it out later
So is bottles next dead then?
Between what?
By the way
How the fuck do you not know what btw means?
It’s because he hasn’t tried Arch yet.
Just the language on the description feels like AI, but I’m just speculating without digging deeper.
you mean i can finally double click an exe and it works all set up with no fiddling?
if so count me in when this is ready.
I thought you could already do that with WINE?
i’ve done it and it requires a bit of setting up for each app. at least the way i did it.
something like steam that dynamically downloads protonfixes and the best version of wine for the game in question without any of my input, except for double clicking desktop apps would be legit amazing.
This double click works tho
which setup are you running?
Has anyone built this and tried it?
Sounds like sort of a hybrid between a VM and WINE where programs get access to a real Windows kernel. Sounds promising and it’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.
Is this similar to Bottles in being a front-end for WINE, a fork of WINE itself, or independent program similar to WINE? No matter which, I will have to keep it in mind for future random needs for Windows programs.
From the site:
How does it work?
A virtual machine boots a guest operating system. Compatibility runtimes such as Wine instead implement the Windows interfaces an application needs.
Raven runs the .exe directly on the CPU in a supervised guest process. Some Windows functions execute inside that process, in Raven’s guest components or libraries. Requests for supervisor-managed services cross into the runtime outside it, which manages processes, handles, files and registry state and mediates access to the Linux host.
Raven implements Windows Installer custom actions, side-by-side assemblies through WinSxS and a service manager. These are among the interfaces real installers depend on; application compatibility still needs testing.
The official redistributables can be installed with their classic installers, like you would on Windows (Visual C++ 2005 to 2022, DirectX, .NET Framework 3.5 and 4.8, XNA and OpenAL). Raven protects its own system libraries during installation. Snapshot creation can fail, so check that a checkpoint exists before relying on rollback. Tested applications can use the vendor’s installer; other applications may still fail to install or start.
Graphics go straight to Wayland and Vulkan, with DXVK and vkd3d-proton for Direct3D.
It’s still unclear where the “Raven’s guest components or libraries” come from… which I think it’s the question that was being asked (given that wine is a reimplementation of the Windows components).
EDIT: apparently they are using ReactOS implementation of the Windows kernel & system libraries to translate the system calls, and beyond that they use the official Microsoft libraries that need to be installed inside the Raven runtime, like you would install in ReactOS.
EDIT2: Also apparently there’s some controversy going on because ReactOS is GPL but Raven is getting distributed as MIT, so there’s a bit of a mix of licenses which opened a bit of a debate.
Thanks for your reply, wasn’t sure if it was just a new WINE mod or its own thing (just similar in some elements like prefix and dot folder stuff). It is kind of awesome that part of ReactOS is being used while the main OS is still not ready.
Raven relicensed to gpvl3 now.
Oh awesome, I had misunderstood that paragraph as it being a VM solution like Winboat, but your clarification makes the project much more exciting
Ive never opened a thread on lemmy and seen anyone not hate whatever the thread is about. Everyone here just seemingly hates everything and its always everyone elses fault about why people dont leave reddit for here…
Idk if you’re seeing some posts I’m not, but the discourse here does not feel negative to me at all.
As I write this comment, the 2nd most upvoted comment is accusing OP of 3 day AI slop (32 upvotes).
Well, yeah. In this day and age all one-person projects with that amount of commits/changes is slop until proven otherwise. That slopcore web page is absolute garbage though. Knowing that it’s the bottles dev and that the repo has existed for a year gives it a bit more credibility, even if it is heavily llm assisted
Yes, a lot of haters in Lemmy, but at least for me it’s irrelevant if someone has an orgasm downvoting by default
Downvotes don’t mean anything on lemmy. Be yourself.
That is the point, votes are anyway misleading
Post “Missil killed 150 children”
Put you an like or an dislike?
