So as most of you know, WINE is a utility to allow Windows applications to be run in Unix. There are several commercial forks, such as CrossOver Office and Cedega, which supposedly work better. It seems like most anything works.

Here is a list of Windows programs that are good enough that I still have Windows installed:

• Photoshop CS2. (The only thing slicker is CS3.) It’s an industry standard and, as nice as GIMP might be, I know Photoshop well.
• iTunes. I buy music through the iTMS periodically, probably about 60 songs total. It looks like there are Windows apps to convert them all to MP3, but really, iTunes is just a phenomenal music player, so I’d like to keep it.
• Office 2007. Prior versions were decent, but OpenOffice gave them a run for their money. (With emphasis, really, on the money portion?) 2007, though, is just so slick that I’ll keep Windows around for it.
• Quicken, maybe. I don’t use it a lot, but I should.
• Battlefield 2. The one video game I’m not awful at. It’s also a game my friends/roommates play frequently, so I’m in good company when playing it.

Here is a list of the very few programs that don’t work in Crossover Office / Cedega / WINE:

•  Photoshop CS(2). Photoshop 7 and previous versions apparently work fine. I don’t have older versions, I don’t think, and even if I did, CS2 added some features I really like.
• iTunes 7. I guess something like iTunes 4 ran fine. (And companies market that their product runs iTunes, which is technically accurate but very, very misleading: it’s like saying you support Windows when all you support is Windows 3.1.) I find this one a little odd, as OS X, its native platform, is UNIX-based.
• Office 2007. Everything up to Office 2003 apparently works flawlessly. Office 2007 doesn’t work at all.
• BF2. It apparently kind of works, but the anti-cheat technology needs some work, because it detects that it’s not a ‘normal’ Windows environment. This is sort of a big deal, since triggering the anti-cheat technology results in getting banned. But it’s a moot point, because it looks like it only works with nvidia cards anyway.

Really, everything else I use in Windows has something that works just as good in Linux. (In fact, most of it runs natively? Firefox and gaim Pidgin are, by far, my two most-used programs, and they both are standard Ubuntu programs. Picasa might come in third, but they now have a Linux version of that, too.)

Conclusion: I’m keeping a Windows partition on the new drive. I still have work to do, but I’ve been very impressed with Ubuntu + XGL + Compiz on the desktop thus far, so I really wish I could run all my favorite apps in it natively. But, sadly, they don’t work on Linux, and they don’t work under Wine.