Wine gets better, but not perfect, with age

not to mention that if you run a virtual machine, you thenhave to worry about patching windows, anti-virus, and all the other problems that windows administration brings.

<rant>
people seem to consider virtualiation to be a solution to administration problems, they tend to ignore the fact that every virtual guest that you create is another (logical) box that has to be administered.

I've seen management reject good network architecture designs because they 'add to much complexity' because it adds a couple more pieces of hardware, but this same management doesn't blink at the thought of adding a few dozen virtual machines.

there is less hardware to manage, but the software management is the majority of the effort.
</rant>

I agree. Just two weeks ago, as a student I've been asked to deliver exercises as windows executables. I installed mingw cross-compiler to do that, and then Wine to check that those executables run ok. I didn't need to do anything to configure Wine. Although I would like to play with virtualization, I don't have enough time to deal with it currently, but then only to try other Linux distros, not to have to deal with Windows...