How is WINE support in 2021?

[EPowIPi]

In a heroic effort I tried to install Alibre Design on my Pixel Phone with Winlator.
I got as far as @Weekdayweekend in the screenshot above. No surprise, Winlator is essentially also Wine based.
Having Alibre on the phone would be a neat, portable setup - with bluetooth mouse and Xreal/Viture etc. AR glasses! Diversion for a long train trip

 

[Weekdayweekend]

A YouTuber named MattKC did a really good video about back-porting Windows apps to Windows 95, in which he did a ton of work with .NET and created a translation layer like Proton to get Windows 98 apps, and even some for later versions of Windows, working on 95. I was thinking that video would be a ton of help for being a .NET dependant app working on Linux, but I'm not savvy enough with it to figure it out myself.
Next thing I'll probably try is copying over my existing Alibre install from Windows to my Linux PC. A lot of people say that works to get other software working, so who knows.

 

[Rhombus]

I too have tried though to get Alibre working through Proton and Bottles and ran into the same error. I also tried following the steps: https://help.alibre.com/articles/#!alibre-help-v28/installed-but-won-t-open-checking-dependencies but everything appears to be comparable to my windows install. Has anyone retrieved log files that might be more verbose than "windows process error"?

 

[Weekdayweekend]

Alibre and Vegas Pro are really the only two pieces of software keeping me on Windows, and I have only 6 months before I am basically stuck with Linux.
Windows 11 has proven to be multiple times that it's not for me, between bricking my laptop, multiple massive privacy concerns, forced AI integration, etc, I have no choice but to switch to Linux in October when Windows 10 support ends.
I'm a Linux noob, but once I swap I'll gladly continue testing Alibre on it.

 

[Rhombus]

I doing more tinkering, and I am pretty sure that the -3513 Error is coming from Nalpeiron/Zentitle, the licensing platform used by alibre. I was entertaining the idea that using an offline license or master license server could possible circumvent Zentitle, but I think that is just wishful thinking. I've been looking for the .dll / .exe that runs zentitle, but I think it must be baked into one of the larger binaries(source Nalpeiron's website).

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Nalpeiron makes a big deal of detecting/denying virtual environments, so zentitle probably just pulls the plug when is sees weird virtualized wine hardware. There may be hope tho, from what I've read it seams like their virtualization detection is mostly geared towards identifying concurrent instances of the same license key and not outright detection. Appeasing zentitle is in the cards.

 

[DavidJ]

-3513 if coming from Nalpeiron indicates a 'Windows process error' related to the Zentitle Library.

 

[EPowIPi]

I hate it when copy protection becomes usage prevention for the paying customers. Or worse (like in the case of Notion 3 where the copy protection hid some information outside the file system, overwriting parts of my dual boot setup, so my system didn't boot anymore. That "copy protection" was technically computer sabotage...)

 

[DavidJ]

I hate it when copy protection becomes usage prevention for the paying customers.

If you believe Alibre's licensing system is preventing legitimate use - please contact us.

This thread relates to people attempting to get Alibre to run on Linux. Nalpeiron licensing can be implemented on other platforms including Linux, the Alibre integration of Nalpeiron is for Windows.

 

[EPowIPi]

Formally Alibre isn't supported on anything but Windows, I know. It is just a pattern with many programs that they would technically work without problems under wine, just the copy protection is using hacky ways that aren't supported. So, it is preventing legitimate use (when the copy protection is really the only thing preventing usage with wine), just not legitimate use that the company is officially supporting. Usually that means "too bad" and nothing happens. So all we can do is grumble

Edit: Perhaps Alibre could internally build a version without copy protection and test it under wine. If this version works flawlessly then it might be worth to talk to the license system provider. If not then it's probably not worth it.

 

[Mika]

Hello. Have anybody tried Zorin OS to install Alibre on it?

 

[EPowIPi]

Afaik Zorin OS uses wine for Windows compatibility. So I guess the experiments in this thread should also apply to Zorin OS. (Haven't tried it.)

 

[Mika]

How about ”Bottles”? -> Flatpak sandboxing?

 

[EPowIPi]

You need some implementation of the Windows APIs. Afaik there are only two recent ones: The Microsoft implementation based on the NT kernel that is part of "real" Windows and wine based variants that work e.g. with the Linux or the macOS Darwin kernel. Flatpak-ing the Microsoft implementation wouldn't work for several technical and legal reasons, so there is only the wine route remaining.
When there is no need for the full WinAPI then there are other alternatives. E.g. for .NET there is Mono and Microsoft's own distributions that are e.g. available as snap, flatpak etc.

Fingers crossed that will be an option for the new Alibre version with the revised UI. Currently one afaik needs full WinAPI and thus Windows or wine (the latter currently not being supported)

Edit: Your best (and probably only) option to run current Alibre versions under Linux or macOS is a virtual machine (like Virtualbox for Linux or Parallels for macOS) and a client Windows 10 or 11 installation. Which needs a Windows license, enough RAM and enough SSD space.

Additionally there is an option to try to raise awareness at Codeweavers, the commercial company behind wine. There was an advocate assigned for Alibre Design - but this was 10+ years ago... No official testing happened with recent wine versions apparently according to their database: https://www.codeweavers.com/compati...jYxlWvxLENm5sIOuGr4cVTYAih8fEXgtwjIK4wCo2I8Ta
But I guess when it is copy protection related (e.g. doing things that Windows applications are normally not supposed to do) then there is little that Codeweavers can do (or want to do for security/sanity reasons...). Only Alibre/Nalpeiron could fix this. But when the copy protection issue is solved then there could still be other issues on the table. That's where Codeweavers might be able to help if there is enough incentive for them (e.g. by paying members voting for support of Alibre Design)

 

[Mika]

So far I’m using Alibre on my Ubuntu laptop via Remmina/Remote Desktop. It works fine when I have my Windows PC open on my officeroom outside.

 

[kdepro`]

I wrote in other topic about quite good experience with VM without GPU passthrough. I once again tested it (Alibre Design Expert v28) with improved setup: VMware Workstation 17 Pro (it's free now) + Windows 11 IoT LTSC, on Ryzen 5700X and NVMe disk, host is Kubuntu 24.04. And again, I'm very pleased how it works. Unfortunately, I don't think this is somethone that Pro/Expert users would accept, or rely on, even though it might be better than remote connection. But I think it could atually be a good option for Atom users.

 

[bicycleboy]

I doing more tinkering, and I am pretty sure that the -3513 Error is coming from Nalpeiron/Zentitle, the licensing platform used by alibre. I was entertaining the idea that using an offline license or master license server could possible circumvent Zentitle, but I think that is just wishful thinking. I've been looking for the .dll / .exe that runs zentitle, but I think it must be baked into one of the larger binaries(source Nalpeiron's website).

View attachment 44396

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Nalpeiron makes a big deal of detecting/denying virtual environments, so zentitle probably just pulls the plug when is sees weird virtualized wine hardware. There may be hope tho, from what I've read it seams like their virtualization detection is mostly geared towards identifying concurrent instances of the same license key and not outright detection. Appeasing zentitle is in the cards.
View attachment 44397

I could be wrong but isn't -3513 the error you'd get if you tried to run your existing application on another machine without asking Alibre to transfer the license to the new machine? The Nalpeiron document above seems to indicate that might be the problem.

 

[DavidJ]

I could be wrong but isn't -3513 the error you'd get if you tried to run your existing application on another machine without asking Alibre to transfer the license to the new machine? The Nalpeiron document above seems to indicate that might be the problem.

NO. That would result in 'maximum number of installs exceeded' message.

Also no need to ask Alibre to transfer the licence, in most cases the customer can do this themselves.

 

[Weekdayweekend]

Linux support would be a game-changer, whether it is through Wine or otherwise. Not many CAD packages run well on Linux, unless it's a browser-based one like OnShape.
The number of people using Linux is growing rapidly. I know it's a massive undertaking to get it working on Linux... I simply don't know what I'm going to do in October otherwise

 

[EPowIPi]

NX apparently had a Linux version until version 12, then they dropped it. Pity. Well, probably NX is in a price league where people buy fitting workstations for their CAD system instead of CAD systems for their workstations, so customers will just have to buy whatever runs it.
Mac and Linux compatibility for Alibre would be awesome indeed though!

 

[mariogt]

Hi, all. I'm a new Alibre user from Fusion 360 and FreeCAD. I'm running Alibre successfully on my M3 MacBook Pro on Windows 11 ARM through Parallels Desktop. Also, Alibre works okay on VMware Fusion, but it's slower. I'm a dual OS user: MacOS on my laptop and WinOS on my workstation. I hope Alibre will be ported to macOS someday. In the meantime, virtualization is the way to go on macOS. Cheers!