Comment by pxc

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.