All of this ... just works?

As I am doing my final spot checks on a MapGuide Open Source 4.0.1-Test release, I am lamenting that MapGuide Maestro was still windows-only and even though a multi-platform rewrite is in my plans, that is in the distant future. Meaning that to spot-check functionality on an MGOS Linux installation, I'd have to either:

1. Make raw HTTP requests to its mapagent (painstaking)
2. Spin up a Windows VM to run Maestro that connects out to the mapagent on that MGOS Linux installation (less painstaking, but still painful)

But then I thought a bit harder. Thanks to the efforts of Lord Gaben, gaming is now viable on Linux. Most windows games that don't use invasive kernel anti-cheats "just work" now out-of-the-box on Linux. It's part of the reason I was comfortable jumping ship from Windows 10 when it went EOL last year.

But I have been viewing this strictly from a gaming context, maybe we can apply that same logic to windows apps in general?

I go and download the latest zip release of MapGuide Maestro from GitHub, extracted the contents to some folder.

Then I open a terminal in that folder and ran: 

wine Maestro.exe

And ... it just works!

This is on Fedora 44, my daily driver OS and one of the major Linux distros!

Does Maestro under Wine operate flawlessly? Not sure. YMMV. Does this invalidate the need for a multi-platform rewrite of Maestro? Not exactly, that plan is still in place. But this discovery is a nice stop-gap measure to tide the Linux users over until then!

So if your Linux distro can run Steam, it can probably run Maestro as well!