Comment by tombert
20 days ago
Wine is a project that I've grown a near-infinite level of respect for.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a lot of the work for Wine is boring and thankless. Digging through and trying to get exact parity with both the documented and undocumented behavior of Windows for the past 30 years doesn't sound fun, but it's finding every little weird edge case that makes Wine a viable product.
The fact that Wine runs a lot of games better than Windows now (especially older games) shows a very strong attention to detail and a high tolerance for pain. I commend them for it.
I avoided using Wine (and Linux for gaming generally) for years on the sole basis that I assumed what they were trying to do was impossible to do well. Occasionally I’d try wine for some simple game and be impressed it worked at all, but refused to admit to myself that it was something I could rely on. (This was many years ago and I freely admit today that I was wrong.)
Valve's Proton (so Wine + DXVK + some other additions) revolutionized gaming on Linux. I play games both for fun and work, and for a solid 3+ years now, gaming on Linux has been an "it just works" experience for me, and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.
Now if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies (like the Wine team), that would be amazing! I would add extra money on every purchase to support these people!
31 replies →
I really is impressive. I wish publishers like EA and anti-cheat developers weren't so reluctant to support it. I hope Steam devices and SteamOS gain enough traction to force their hands.
14 replies →
By and large Im happy to not participate in games that use kernel level anti-cheat.
It's reached the level where a game not working is a suprise.
Space Marine 2 was the latest one for me, but Steam is great at refunds if you do it quickly enough.
2 replies →
> and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.
It actually gives a far better user experience for games like Battlefield 6, because on Linux they just don't work at all. Try it for yourself - it won't even start!
By contrast if you run Battlefield 6 on Windows, eventually you'll end up playing it, and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a shitty buggy mess and you'll hate it.
So, notch up another score for Linux!
With Proton especially, which is WINE really optimized with all of the right options and a few other things, I play literally any game on linux and never worry about support. It hasn't steered me wrong yet in the last 3 or 4 years I think.
It has gotten to the point where I just skip buying games that don't work under proton, and there's really very few that I've missed.
To be fair, early wine (when I first tried it) wasn't very usable, and for gaming specifically. So if you were an early enthusiast adopter, you might've just experienced their growing pains.
Also, I assume some Windows version jumps didn't make things easy for Wine either lol
The hype/performance mismatch was significant in the 2000s for Wine. I’m not sure if there was any actual use case aside from running obscure business software.
Yes, there was “the list” but there was no context and it was hard to replicate settings.
I think everyone tried running a contemporary version of Office and Photoshop, saw the installer spit out cryptic messages and just gave up. Enough time has passed with enough work done, and Wine now supports/getting to support the software we wanted all along.
Also, does anyone remember the rumours that OS X was going to run Windows applications?
6 replies →
It took some futzing. The crusty PlayOnLinux UI is permanently etched into my brain.
1 reply →
I remember managing to play Crysis under Linux with Wine and I was SO impressed. Never would’ve imagined one day almost every game would be playable.
It's an unfair fear since architecturally Wine sits at the same position as the Win32 API on Windows, which also in the end merely uses the underlying native system calls. The only difference is that Linux aims to keep its system call interface stable.
You're saying that Windows' system interfaces aren't stable? In comparison to Linux?
4 replies →
Meanwhile I've been impressed with Wine since I discovered it. One of the few things that was keeping me from moving to Linux was MS Office suite. I struggled to get used to OpenOffice. And wine was able to run it. Sure I had to faff around with it, but I was just so impressed. I was telling all my family, but they just didn't get it.
Anyway, I later stopped using it because Google Docs and then later libreoffice was good enough. I still followed it, and I continued to be impressed by all the announcements.
The first time I seriously used wine it was to run Forscan (https://forscan.org/home.html) to interface with my car via OBD2 port. It quite literally just worked. Installed via the executable MSI installer, finished install, booted right up, and worked with the USB device.
I have been using Wine on Mac for fifteen years now since I moved to Mac for work. There's always been a couple Windows programs I just can't seem to replace fully, namely RegexBuddy, and I continue to run them in Wine to this day. Everything has gotten so much better as the years have gone on, that this is a perfectly acceptable solution.
[flagged]
You seem to have missed this part of the comment you replied to:
> This was many years ago and I freely admit today that I was wrong.
Personally I stopped using Windows for gaming because it literally doesn't work anymore. I installed Windows 11 on my gaming VM and DLSS and FSR were just completely broken, didn't work at all. Couldn't figure it out. Switched to Linux (Bazzite for now) and I have no regrets; the only games that don't work are the dangerous time-wasters (live service games with invasive anti-cheat) that I have less and less time for as I age.
Windows itself is a bunch of hacks, too, so if you think Wine is the same, then it surely looks like a very accurate emulation.
1 reply →
You're saying the opposite of what the person you think you're agreeing with is.
I look forward to your conversion 20 years from now.
It is a superb project, and a hard thing to do.
It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
> It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. MS Office is using every single corner of Windows: every feature in the XML libraries, tons of .NET type stuff, all the OLE and COM and typelib and compound storage features, tons of Explorer integrations, auto-updating stuff via Windows patching mechanisms... there's almost no corner of the Windows OS that MS Office doesn't use.
Yeah, people forget that MS Office, and Excel and Outlook in particular, are the real foundation of Microsoft's vendor lock-in on the desktop.
24 replies →
You're onto something but that's not entirely true for all games. There's plenty of vintage games, made before DirectX standardized everything into the late 90s, that don't work well under wine because back in their day, they would try to bypass windows by "hacking" their way to the hardware via unsupported APIs and hooks, to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware, and also because every hardware vendor back then from graphics to sound shipped their own APIs.
11 replies →
Office used to work well on WINE. It was the switch to a rolling release model that killed it.
So that's what's keeping Microsoft from just running WINE on an MS-flavored Linux or perhaps a clean slate kernel as their next OS. I've been wondering for a while, this is by far the best explanation.
7 replies →
For games, part of that mere „output” is 3d graphics, so replicating the internals of Direct 3D exactly right and getting the Linux GPU drivers to cooperate. That’s a hardcore task.
1 reply →
Parts of the OS were designed for Office. (Windows installer service, for example)
> Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output.
They should be trivial to port then, no?
8 replies →
Steam and CodeWeavers contribute a lot of code to the Wine project, because it underpins their business models of supporting Windows games on non-Windows platforms.
Between them they make up the vast bulk of what actually gets attention and improvement in Wine, and neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.
> neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.
I don't know how much of their business it is today, but CodeWeavers spent their first decade or so supporting only non-game applications. Their product Crossover was originally Crossover Office because it was optimized around productivity applications.
3 replies →
I find it difficult to believe that someone with enough technical knowledge to run a Linux desktop for business purposes in 2026 would be reliant on the MS Office suite. Other people have given plenty of technical reasons for the difficulty. I don't think it’s a useful goal to get them running when practical alternatives like libreoffice exist.
Libreoffice isn’t a practical alternative if your are an Excel or Word power user.
I don't know that they are. It's just there's more incentive to port stuff that has no direct alternative.
Games really only usually rely on standardized libraries and APIs, whereas application software relies on system libraries to do things like paint their UI.
these apps are all like web browsers, and likely needlessly complicated due to patching the same codebase for so long. its MS afterall. there will be code in there that they themselves hardly understand.
Although running Microsoft web apps are getting better.
Wine has a lot of tests that are run across platforms to check conformance -- https://test.winehq.org/data/. These are a large part of why it has good compatibility.
With this exact point in mind: I've recently written a pretty straight forward win32 c implementation of a utility with some context dependent window interactions and a tray icon to help monitor and facility reload of config file.
Is there any way I can use the Wine project to facilitate this compiling and running straight under x11/linux environment as a integrated project that doesn't require the end user to fiddle with Wine? I don't mind bundling shared code as needed. Help appreciated, I tried hard and failed at this endeavour priorly.
> Is there any way I can use the Wine project to facilitate this compiling and running straight under x11/linux environment as a integrated project that doesn't require the end user to fiddle with Wine? I don't mind bundling shared code as needed. Help appreciated, I tried hard and failed at this endeavour priorly.
I believe that's what Winelib is for: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G...
2 replies →
It’s astounding how badly Microsoft had to fumble their complete and unassailable monopoly on the standard video game runtime (ie Windows) for an upstart like Valve to be able to get WINE/Proton into a place where this is now possible.
The mind reels. They had the biggest moat in tech, and now small shops are easily tossing homemade ladders across the gap. AAA gaming is an industry larger than all of Hollywood, and Windows is no longer a critical component. This is incompetence on an unthinkable scale.
I wonder when and how Excel’s stranglehold will eventually be cracked, and if I will live to see it. Perhaps the new agentic universe will cause someone to finally make the Pixelmator of Excel.
There are huge swaths of workplaces that run on Google Docs. If you're using features of Excel and PowerPoint that doesn't work on Docs (except maybe fonts), it might be fair to say you're the one with the incompatible doc these days. K-12 education would be one such world.
Those aren’t the ones I am talking about. The global economy runs on Excel.
1 reply →
ReactOS also deserves an honorary mention. A lot of knowledge from that project feeds into Wine.
And vice-versa. It's pretty interesting that the two projects haven't kind of merged despite all the collaboration.
Wine devs do not want to work with people who have looked at ReactOS[0] (see at the end) so any collaboration is one-way (or by ignoring the guidelines) and the likelihood of the two projects merging is zero.
[0] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
1 reply →
Very different projects so I would not encourage a merge but sharing a code base? I can totally see that being a boon for both and other Windows emulation projects.
1 reply →
I simply wouldn’t have the patience to do what Elizabeth did, for a month, much less years. Really really impressive
I guess the silver lining is that the Windows ABI is extremely stable
Way back in the 90s when I used OS/2 and running Windows applications required running a fully copy of Windows inside OS/2,¹ I had dreamed of writing something akin to Wine for OS/2, but I lacked the knowledge to do it back then (and still do). I’ve never used it since I never use Linux in a context that it would make sense (for me, as is the case for most Linux users I suspect, Linux is strictly a headless server OS). Apparently Wine is also available for the Mac, but these days I don’t know of a single Windows app² that I would want to run.
⸻
1. A frequent debate about the time was whether this was a wise thing to do as it reduced the motivation for developers to create OS/2-native versions of applications. The slow death of OS/2 can be interpreted as both support for those who felt that Windows-under-OS/2 was a bad idea and those who felt that OS/2 was doomed from the start in the face of the Windows monopoly.
2. Largely because I’m not a gamer—when I’ve looked at what it takes, both in terms of hardware and in learning how to do stuff in games, I’ve decided that I’m happy staying that way.
I was rewriting an old game of mine using SDL2 for release on Steam—had struggled with getting a build target for Linux/Steam Deck.
Man, Wine just worked and I confess I copped out and just delivered MacOS and Windows targets.
There was a time when WINE was iffy. At best.
It’s gotten good and reliable.
Commendations to contributors!
Yes, Wine is truly a miracle. Once full support for Office is achieved, we should expect huge uptick in Linux adoption.
> full support for office
does microsoft still sell office?
Yes, Microsoft does still sell MS Office 2024 as a one time purchase:
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
5 replies →
Yes the do have an one time purchase option. You get 5 years of updates but no new features. I have it on my home computers. But new features are not a big deal since the differences are not big anymore (just like mobile phones.)
I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to suddenly add "features" that break said support.
"Office ain't done 'til Wine won't run"?
Ny that time office will be cloud only.
That's not boring at all. A lot of the works done in Wine can be fed back to ReactOS
I spent my entire college career doing consulting for a company that worked on Wine since Wine was part of its commercial offering.
The work is not boring (it's fascinating!) but completely thankless. The documentation on MSDN was (and I'm guessing still is) complete shit, and most of the APIs are undocumented. Random fixes would have knock on effects. I contributed a bit to some cases on a bug open since the 90s, and since I'm still on the list, I still get messages about it!
With AI, you can automate all the grunt work.
AI unreliability aside, Microsoft suing the hell out of them was always a concern. They do clean room reimplementation to insulate themselves from legal risks as much as possible, another incentive is not what anyone wants.
Well about clean room, you almost got a haircut due to Google v. Oracle in the Android-Java API dispute
I've tried to use Wine in order to play Steam Windows games on Mac. Wine silently exposes all my macos drives as D:/F:/etc that was open to any game I started. Immediately removed Wine. Awful experience.
Wine configuration -> Drives -> Remove
It's like the most trivial thing to change
It's impossible to know this behavior on first installation. I prefer opt-in fior sharing my disks to wine.