DISCUSSION: Future of Winbox-Mac support

[belthesar]

Hi folks! -

As I'm sure many of you have seen, Mikrotik has shipped a preview version of their new Winbox 4, which includes cross platform support for Windows, macOS and Linux. This is fantastic, as a first party cross platform Winbox solution from Mikrotik has been what many Mikrotik users have been asking of them for years now. I've had a chance to use it, and it is both familiar and fresh in all the best ways. We all know that running Winbox in WINE on macOS has been fraught with inconsistencies, weird behaviors, and hard to troubleshoot bugs. The objective with this package, IMO (it wasn't my project originally), has been to try and provide a good, easy to use compromise to run Winbox on macOS that doesn't require maintaining your own WINE prefix. Even with the rough edges, it's hard to say that it hasn't served the need.

That said, Winbox 4 is definitely close, but not feature complete, and still has some known rough edges that Normis and the Winbox team are working out. Probably the most important from a configuration safety standpoint is the lack of Safe Mode, however the list of things still being worked on is fairly substantial. There is some issues with older OS compatibility as well based on reports in the forums (seeing reports of issues with macOS 11), although we've also not made a huge effort to support unsupported macOS versions.

For the immediate future, I plan to support this project until at least the first non-beta release of Winbox 4. When that ships, I'll do an evaluation as to whether it makes sense to continue putting time and energy into this wrapper. That said, I am personally already able to migrate all of my Winbox-related work to Winbox 4, which means the personal benefit of maintaining this wrapper has gone down significantly. I would encourage everyone to try Winbox 4 out for your day to day usage.

I'd like to centralize feedback here around situations where Winbox 3 works for you, but Winbox 4 does not. As Winbox 4 continues to receive updates, we'll check that against your issues, and ask folks to retest. Please do not document issues here around the Winbox 4 UI, or other UX "nags". Instead, please document breaking functionality issues that prevent you from using Winbox 4 to manage your gear in your network.

Bad issues to track examples:

• I don't like Winbox 4's dropdowns, tabs were better.
• Winbox 4's UI does not make separation of lines easy to read.

Good issues to track example:

• Using Winbox 4, I can not connect to my equipment using RADIUS authentication.
• Winbox 4 does not support Safe Mode configuration changes.
• I can not open Winbox 4 on my system (list of hardware specs follow)

Thanks everyone. Also, a huge thanks to @nrlquaker who started the project, and to @Gcenx who has helped quite a bit with building the slim WINE environment.

[kubert96]

Look at:

********** STATUS UPDATE September 2 ***************

Known issues to be addressed:
Improve contrast in both light and dark modes for old displays with low contrast ratio
Most people prefer Tabs over Dropdowns
Needs list of open windows
Comment column functionality is confusing for many people
Many UI buttons need Hover help text
Needs clear UI to import Winbox3 saved routers, and for saving the database to Cloud Folders
Some font legibility issues in some Linux installations, also in some cases where Windows OS has non standard DPI or scaling.
Special characters lost when upgrading from WinBox3, but work fine when entered via WinBox4
Side menu popup (IP etc) is lost too quickly, when moving mouse diagonally
Columns can't change order by dragging
Log, Ping etc. windows don't automatically go to end of entries
Log colors for severity levels missing
macOS trackpad does not scroll sideways
Safemode missing
Undo / Redo missing
Can't Select All items with keyboard
Some drag and drop issues with files. Can't drag file to Desktop
Skins not supported
Quick Find missing
Vertical grid requested by several users
Vertical row height needs to be more compact, as requested by several users
Linux distribution users wish for better distribution methods
Windows version is sluggish when quickly moving around windows, lags behind mouse. Known bug and will be fixed.
Needs ability to "select many routers and connect to all" in Loader
Missing launch parameter support (ie. launch winbox.exe 1.1.1.1 user pass)
Need auto light-dark mode setting based on OS settings
Missing tree view of sub-interfaces like VLANs
LTE Interface graphs are missing
********** STATUS UPDATE ***************

[belthesar]

@kubert96 I appreciate this, and understand this is sourced directly from the Winbox 4 announcement thread on Mikrotik's forum. I personally don't feel that everything in this list is a must-have with regards to continued support of this project, although these may be "must-haves" for Mikrotik before they consider a Winbox 4 out of preview, in which they'll all be addressed before I roll off anyway.

If anything in this list is a must have for your workflows however, please feel free to call them out.

[belthesar]

Hi folks - just an update here on the current status of things:

Winbox 4.0 has seen a lot of great patches since the initial beta release. There's certainly a fair amount of folks who feel the UI/UX isn't what they'd like it to be, and still some minor issues with functionality not working as expected or desired, but for the vast majority of features, it's a very nice step in the right direction, and a very functional tool.

As for this project, the release of Winbox 4 preceded a major macOS update that introduced a new security entitlement requirement that broke some of the functionality of Winbox-mac, with issues documented in #156 and #157. While it took a little while for a potential fix to be released for testing, we do have one available for folks to try. Admittedly, it's not an ideal one, and the one user who has provided feedback has shared shared that it comes with limitations of where the app bundle can be installed (which there is a workaround for), but it does work well on the two machines I can test on (I use it to symlink the dev app bundle to my Applications folder).

What is clear however is that it's becoming more difficult with the changes in macOS to keep this project going (I fully expect this workaround to get patched). An alternative would be to formally code sign the bundle, but the cost to enroll in the Apple Developer program is not something I'm personally willing to invest in. I don't release other software on macOS that benefits from code signing, and in all honesty, I wouldn't feel comfortable signing a package containing binaries made by Mikrotik. This may mean that Winbox-mac may be relegated to being a legacy option for users not running macOS Sequoia and its successors.

All that to say, there may not be a whole lot more that I can do with Winbox-mac to keep it going for all users until the first non-beta release of Winbox 4. If I don't get any more negative feedback in the next week or so, I'll do a full release of Winbox-mac 3.41.1 that includes the changes to workaround local network discovery. If this, or something else, breaks further however, folks that wish to continue using it to run Winbox 3 on Mac will need to accept that the app works, but with reduced functionality.