I've experienced multiple instances where (so I heard; I don't use Windows) a Windows Update completely broke a game on Windows for everyone, but Wine/Proton kept running it just fine. So we're already there in some sense.
What I wonder about is if MS wants to keep people on windows, what methods they can use to do that. For simple desktop stuff I don't think they have many options to lock in other developers (and their audiences) to windows unless they want do so themselves (putting aside web based or not PC-desktop).
Bleeding edge gaming and multiplayer anti-cheat is one area where I think having a big company owning the OS probably helps them stay ahead, as that structure probably lets them work with hardware designers to get the capabilities in use (i.e. in new versions of DirectX) and available to software developers first. There's generally a lag in adoption for new features within Vulkan and then usage downstream in wine/proton to get compatibility parity with windows, then the games themselves being able to run feature/performance parity. It'd be interesting to see what cooperation would be needed to have the linux gaming stack equal at the point new features are released, and with the least amount of manual hacks or command line tweaking required for the users. As discussed a few weeks back, tough anti-cheat for linux seems like a paradox with the current methods.
> What I wonder about is if MS wants to keep people on windows, what methods they can use to do that
Microsoft doesn't give a fuck about private customers any more. They don't have money.
What has money though is enterprise/government sales, and MS got these customers tightly locked in. Compliance audits and tooling for insurances or legal stuff (SOX, GDPR, ...) are built against a full Microsoft stack of MS Server, Active Directory, Azure, Teams, Office 365 and Windows desktops.
You might be able to get away with replacing AD and GPO with Samba servers but even that is already a pain when the auditors come knocking. Everything else? There is no single FOSS based "standard offering" (i.e. a combination of everything needed to run an on-prem enterprise site, Office replacement, remote collaboration tooling), so every audit for such setups must be custom made and involves a lot of extra work.
A second leg is industrial control machines, medical devices and the likes. That's all stuff built by third party vendors and integrators. They need to continue on Windows because switching to an alternative OS would require redoing everything from scratch on the software and certification side. These customers buy the LTSC IoT stuff.
And that is why you see Microsoft pushing enshittification so hard on private customers... extract the last few cents you can from them. But the real money comes from the large customers.
For a while it seemed like Microsoft wasn't taking Windows seriously as a product. And the easiest way to cut costs on that is to use a solution someone else is building and maintaining. They did retire Internet Explorer in favor of a Chromium browser, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.
Anything Direct Draw related will be mapped into OpenGL under Unix giving you decent speeds. On Windows it will be a crawling slideshow because from Windows 8 and up it will use a really dog slow software mode with no acceleration at all, worse than plain VESA. Yes, you can reuse WineD3D DLL's on Windows and run these game in a fast way, but not by default, it's a Win32 port of some Wine libraries.
It certainly runs 16-bit Windows games better than Windows 11, which can't run them at all. Not that there are a ton of those, but it's still pretty neat that they work.
Time to dust off my cd copy of Stars! (From the disk backup, the cd had terminal illnesses and has died). The only win16 game I've ever seen distributed on CDROM. Wine already ran it ok (iirc there were some issues but nothing gamebraking), but now it can do so without i386 libs.
MS got such a black eye for that that they're developing a build of windows specifically for handhelds, optimized, without the bloat and power hungry extras. Would be nice if it ran on laptops
I've experienced multiple instances where (so I heard; I don't use Windows) a Windows Update completely broke a game on Windows for everyone, but Wine/Proton kept running it just fine. So we're already there in some sense.
I remember when the shader caching done for a popular game in linux made that game run better than the windows version
It feels like it won't be long before Microsoft starts helping with that (by making Windows less stable, not improving Wine).
What I wonder about is if MS wants to keep people on windows, what methods they can use to do that. For simple desktop stuff I don't think they have many options to lock in other developers (and their audiences) to windows unless they want do so themselves (putting aside web based or not PC-desktop).
Bleeding edge gaming and multiplayer anti-cheat is one area where I think having a big company owning the OS probably helps them stay ahead, as that structure probably lets them work with hardware designers to get the capabilities in use (i.e. in new versions of DirectX) and available to software developers first. There's generally a lag in adoption for new features within Vulkan and then usage downstream in wine/proton to get compatibility parity with windows, then the games themselves being able to run feature/performance parity. It'd be interesting to see what cooperation would be needed to have the linux gaming stack equal at the point new features are released, and with the least amount of manual hacks or command line tweaking required for the users. As discussed a few weeks back, tough anti-cheat for linux seems like a paradox with the current methods.
> What I wonder about is if MS wants to keep people on windows, what methods they can use to do that
Microsoft doesn't give a fuck about private customers any more. They don't have money.
What has money though is enterprise/government sales, and MS got these customers tightly locked in. Compliance audits and tooling for insurances or legal stuff (SOX, GDPR, ...) are built against a full Microsoft stack of MS Server, Active Directory, Azure, Teams, Office 365 and Windows desktops.
You might be able to get away with replacing AD and GPO with Samba servers but even that is already a pain when the auditors come knocking. Everything else? There is no single FOSS based "standard offering" (i.e. a combination of everything needed to run an on-prem enterprise site, Office replacement, remote collaboration tooling), so every audit for such setups must be custom made and involves a lot of extra work.
A second leg is industrial control machines, medical devices and the likes. That's all stuff built by third party vendors and integrators. They need to continue on Windows because switching to an alternative OS would require redoing everything from scratch on the software and certification side. These customers buy the LTSC IoT stuff.
And that is why you see Microsoft pushing enshittification so hard on private customers... extract the last few cents you can from them. But the real money comes from the large customers.
Windows 14 will just be a linux distro with wine acting as backwards compatibility.
Why would Microsoft ever do that?
WSL is already there for the folks that want to play with Linux.
For a while it seemed like Microsoft wasn't taking Windows seriously as a product. And the easiest way to cut costs on that is to use a solution someone else is building and maintaining. They did retire Internet Explorer in favor of a Chromium browser, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.
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Inb4 Windows 40k and to run the "kernel" you need to sacrifice 1000 a day
By the time we get to version 40k the kernel will just be AI hallucinating a UI for you at 60fps.
Secondly, I do acknowlege your 40k reference.
Wine actually does run some ancient Windows games better than Windows 11 itself.
Anything Direct Draw related will be mapped into OpenGL under Unix giving you decent speeds. On Windows it will be a crawling slideshow because from Windows 8 and up it will use a really dog slow software mode with no acceleration at all, worse than plain VESA. Yes, you can reuse WineD3D DLL's on Windows and run these game in a fast way, but not by default, it's a Win32 port of some Wine libraries.
Once I had to use a Mesa3D build for Windows and use the zink driver to render OpenGL to Vulkan, otherwise it would use Windows' software renderer.
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It certainly runs 16-bit Windows games better than Windows 11, which can't run them at all. Not that there are a ton of those, but it's still pretty neat that they work.
16-bit software won't run natively in 64-bit mode. It requires some programmatic emulator, like DosBox. Or am I missing something?
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Time to dust off my cd copy of Stars! (From the disk backup, the cd had terminal illnesses and has died). The only win16 game I've ever seen distributed on CDROM. Wine already ran it ok (iirc there were some issues but nothing gamebraking), but now it can do so without i386 libs.
Not just ancient games!
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s...
MS got such a black eye for that that they're developing a build of windows specifically for handhelds, optimized, without the bloat and power hungry extras. Would be nice if it ran on laptops
Wine is also the reason why Windows software has more longevity on Mac than Mac software. Like, 32-bit didn't get deprecated in Wine.
If enough people cared it seems like someone would have created a MacOS32 in MacOS64 like WoW64.
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