Comment by computomatic
20 days ago
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!
Buy a steam deck. It sends a strong signal to Valve to continue supporting Wine and you get a Steam Deck
5 replies →
https://www.winehq.org/donate
11 replies →
You always give 30% to Valve and their interests so far are aligned. Everything that's possible within the Steam ecosystem is available outside of it. Maybe things will change in the future, but I doubt we could be getting a better deal.
Value does pay for development on open source projects already.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34061110
> if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies
Or how about instead of passing the cost off to users, Steam actually supports them from their own profits? After all, they are profiting from free work.
We can't be pushovers about this.
3 replies →
This is a fantastic idea. I completely endorse it. I hope a Valve employee sees this.
Great idea!
Such donations might even be tax-deductible revenue for Valve, so even the finance bros should love it.
Although I would prefer if Valve simply commits to a fixed percentage of its Steam fee to be donated...
5 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.
Idk, kernel anti cheat is a pretty clear sign to me that I should pick a different game to play anyway...
7 replies →
Paying for a game that inserts rootkits into your kernel feels like paying money to get molested. no thanks.
3 replies →
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/03/ea-javelin-anticheat-j...
Because anti cheat on linux is completely useless.
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.
Space Marine 2 works, at least on steam deck
1 reply →
> 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?
I used WINE a lot in the 2000s, mostly for gaming. It was often pretty usable, but you often needed some hacky patches not suitable for inclusion in mainline. I played back then with Cedega and later CrossOver Games, but the games I played the most also had Mac ports so they had working OpenGL renderers.
My first memorable foray into Linux packaging was creating proper Ubuntu packages for builds of WINE that carried compatibility and performance patches for running Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.
Nowadays Proton is the distribution that includes such hacks where necessary, and there are lots of good options for managing per-game WINEPREFIXes including Wine itself. A lot of the UX around it has improved, and DirectX support has gotten really, really good.
But for me at least, WINE was genuinely useful as well as technically impressive even back then.
I remember it being surprisingly decent for games back then. Then a lot of games moved to Steam, which made it way harder to run them in Wine. Of course there was later Proton for that, but not on Mac.
1 reply →
Red Box: https://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/
Also these apps changed, A lot of windows programs were simple executables and I remenber for a moment it was very popular for developers to write portable apps that were just a .exe that you ran,also excel and other programs worked fine, but then microsoft and others started to use msxis or whatever it's called and more complex executable files and it was not longer posible, and microsoft and adobe switched to a subscription based system.
I ran Wine end of 90s to run CS (Half-Life), and I had not only more FPS than Windows. It was more stable as well.
It took some futzing. The crusty PlayOnLinux UI is permanently etched into my brain.
Transgaming! It worked for ons or two games for me, bit it was glorious.
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?
The API underneath the Win32 API, the Windows Native API, is not necessarily stable and therefore not intended for direct consumption by applications.
2 replies →
win32 dates back to 1993. OP doesn't know Windows history. Maintaining backwards compatibility was always a huge priority for Microsoft, even if it couldn't be perfect.
If a program didn't work on a newer version of Windows, there's a good chance it was doing something unsupported.
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.
I think very few software can be considered _not_ a bunch of hacks, especially in the age of vibe coded electron apps.
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.