Website of the Month
The aim of this section is to find decent and relatively unknown websites that will help you with your daily Ubuntu needs (and general curiosity). I will sum up the good and the bad points of the website, and -- with any luck -- the website owner will read the article and then rectify any problems mentioned!
Written by David Cohen
This month's featured website is perhaps more well known than I would have liked, but its usefulness makes it worthy of mention. It is a database of games and applications which run (or don't run) in WINE, and to what degree.
The website is clean and simple, with quick loading times. Down the left side are links which provide easy access to specific things on the site such as screenshots or the latest games/applications added. You can also use the search feature which I found much more convenient.
Each application is given a rank from "garbage" to "platinum." Each rank's meaning is justified on the website. You can register and then become an "application maintainer" for applications that you use regularly under WINE, give it a rank and say what works, and what doesn't. Most applications have several maintainers which gives a balanced overview of what rank the application deserves. A nice feature is that there are three lists, one for platinum, one for gold and one for silver, so you can find applications that run well straight away due to these lists being on the main page.
At the bottom of each page people can post problems and then hopefully get help to fix these issues. There is also a list of known bugs so that you can immediately see whether there is something you need from a program that is not going to work. These are usually solved over time, thankfully.
The website is not without its faults, however. The excellent search function means that the links at the side become somewhat unnecessary. And because it is a sub-domain of the official WINE website, if the main WINE site goes offline the database also goes down, which has happened several times, often around the release of a new version of WINE.
These problems are minor and do not get in the way of the purpose of the website, and so I fully recommend this as a guide for users looking to run applications from Windows in Linux.
