7 ms·

Wine 8.1

89 points by neustradamus 4y ago

josteink 4y ago
Wine gets better and better, more and more impressive… And here I am having nothing to use it for, because all the software I run or need is now available for Linux. I guess I should be glad, but it still feels a little sad? All that effort someone puts in, for a seemingly ever-decreasing need?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Wine, packaged as proton, is essentially the future of gaming on Linux now. Native ports kind of died out as running the Windows build in Proton works better than the native port which would often break after distro updates. It's also a better way of just getting stuff fixed, if there was a bug in the native linux build, you'd have to pester the developers of the game to fix it, while we can assume the windows build works correct so any issue can be fixed by fixing the open source Wine code. Its remarkable that these days you can reasonably expect that just about every game will work flawlessly running in wine.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    >while we can assume the windows build works correct haha
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    >Native ports kind of died out as running the Windows build in Proton works better than the native port which would often break after distro updates. >Its remarkable that these days you can reasonably expect that just about every game will work flawlessly running in wine. Almost every Windows game I check on ProtonDB has a non-platinum rating because of things like "game starts on a black screen until you blindly press a key" or "ending cutscene doesnt play" or "mouse acceleration doesn't work" or a billion other broken things. Is the game playable despite these issues? Sure it's playable. But the fact is that when game devs ignore Linux users assuming that Proton exists, then there is no incentive for them to fix these issues. Even a playable game today can become completely unplayable tomorrow because of a game update that works fine on Windows. With a native build you get a guarantee from the dev that they'll fix their Linux issues.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      >With a native build you get a guarantee from the dev that they'll fix their Linux issues. This was very much not my experience, games would often be broken if you didn't use ubuntu, or if they were a few years old. And the company wouldn't care because the contractors who ported it are gone. Often even leaving the linux version out of date. While any issue with the Windows one in wine, eventually basically any issue I encounter gets patched by an active team of open source devs, some funded by valve.
      - Arnavion 4y ago
        >This was very much not my experience >While any issue with the Windows one in wine, eventually basically any issue I encounter gets patched by an active team of open source devs, some funded by valve. We don't need to talk about your experience. Pick any game in ProtonDB that has a Platinum rating and you'll find 10 more that are lower because they have the issues I described. >games would often be broken if you didn't use ubuntu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634584
        Gigachad 4y ago
        I could go to reddit and see every single game I play is buggy, unusable, and broken on Windows. But when I actually play them I see they are essentially perfect. The internet is great at exposing a million issues you'll never encounter yourself, often with undisclosed details about having mods or some extremely non conventional setup causing the problem. The reality is I game entirely on Linux and everything works perfect for me.
        Arnavion 4y ago
        And the reality is that I game entirely on Linux with a mix of Linux-native and Proton games. The Linux-native games work perfectly and the Proton games all have bugs.
        4y ago
- haunter 4y ago
  >for a seemingly ever-decreasing need I recommend you to read the "Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux" post. Sums up perfectly why Wine is needed and doing perfectly https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ The TLDR is that easier to make games for Windows (single OS and API) and just maintaining Wine/Proton (works across all distros) than actually making a Linux build too of the game. Huge thread when it was posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    Game developers would be fine to target a single distro like Ubuntu 22.04. And I say that as someone who does not use Ubuntu, because I run Steam in a docker (podman) container of Ubuntu 22.04. It's a common base container for all "closed-source / not from my distro's repos" software - Steam, Discord, etc. The downside is that you have to mount whatever things you want to share from the host, like X11 socket, PulseAudio socket, D-Bus socket, etc. The upside is that you get to share only the things you want to trust the closed-source software with. The other day people were complaining how Discord made their system slow by scanning for game processes; Discord couldn't do that for me because it doesn't know about any processes other than itself.
    - RussianCow 4y ago
      That sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more about this. Did you hack something together yourself to allow you to do this, or are you using some software to manage the containers for you?
      - Arnavion 4y ago
        Hacked it together myself. I have a Containerfile with docker.io/library/ubuntu:22.04 base and a RUN step that installs steam + mesa-vulkan-drivers + some other GL and audio libs + 32-bit versions of those, creates a user with the same UID as my user on the host, and adds it to the input group (for controller support). Then I have a `~/.local/bin/steam` script that runs `podman container run --userns=keep-id` with parameters to pass through `/dev/dri` (for GPU), `/dev/input` (for controller), PulseAudio socket, X11 socket, and an empty directory as the home directory. Every week or so when I reboot my PC for updates, I rebuild the container image with whatever is the latest ubuntu base image and other packages at the time. `~/.local/bin/discord` is the same except it doesn't have the controller and GPU stuff, and it has a pre-processing step to download the Linux binary tarball from their website and unpack it into the home directory. I'd share it but it's part of a big private personal repo. I might separate it out into a GitHub Gist or something later.
- ww520 4y ago
  Run Notepad++.
- nix23 4y ago
  Sorry for getting downvoted for using native and probably opensource software, welcome to HN.
Gigachad 4y ago
It's been many years since I used wine on its own outside of proton. Is the experience mostly the same? As I understood, proton included slightly newer patches and tools to make games run better, did this stuff mostly make it back upstream? Has anyone attempted running windows games on an Apple Silicon mac yet? How well does that work? I seem to remember 32 bit support being an issue previously.
- jszymborski 4y ago
  I got Exact Audio Copy running in Wine recently w/o much fuss.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  I've used it to ruin MusicBee for years. It has gotten much much better. While it was technically possible to get .net stuff to work, there was a lot of extra hoops to jump through. Now I just download the installer and run it (but I downgrade the main exe t to an older version to get around one annoying bug) The Mac M1 thing though... Nope. The problem is that Wine on ARM becomes Windows ARM. Many (most?) Windows apps a aren't available on that architecture. So you need to user x86 wine.
- xkcd-sucks 4y ago
  Not for games specifically, but there is a derivative "wine-crossover" that runs 32 bit applications fine on M1, and generally seems to work pretty well (for esoteric scientific instrument software at least, nothing with fancy graphics). See https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine
- oso2k 4y ago
  For a non-gaming use, I followed Shelby's/TechTagents' [0] guide for setting up an EEPROM programmer in Fedora 36 with Wine. I've been able to backup and flash several EEPROMs for my EMM8088 [1] XT replica, including BIOS, XT-IDE, VGA, RPL. In the old days, I used to use Wine for backing up DVDs with DVDShrink, ripping my CD collection to MP3 players, and playing the Windows version of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory before the NVIDIA drivers became viable on Crux Linux. [0] https://youtu.be/AeZDlz2F8GI https://youtu.be/AeZDlz2F8GI [1] https://www.homebrew8088.com/ https://www.homebrew8088.com/
alphabet9000 4y ago
very grateful to the efforts of everyone involved with Wine
- xbar 4y ago
  hear, hear...and for the fast turn from 8.0 to 8.1
ropeladder 4y ago
Alas, Foobar2000 has started crashing regularly on me after a few seconds with Wine version 7.19+: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53818 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53818
- Arnavion 4y ago
  Have you tried deadbeef? It's similar to fb2k, including supporting a lot of the custom printf syntax for displaying and sorting that fb2k has.
zamalek 4y ago
How often does Valve merge Wine into Proton?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Looking at the proton release notes, last time they mentioned updating wine was February 2022, updating to Wine 7.0. About a month after Wine 7.0 was released. So they seem somewhat close to upstream. There is also the GE build of proton which is slightly fresher.
themoonisachees 4y ago
Speaking of wine, I've been trying to play simcity (2013) on Debian recently and proton, lutris and bottles have all failed me. If anyone happens to know what I can do to get past the initial black screen I'll take it.
- Topgamer7 4y ago
  Change the renderer to Vulkan and try.
  - themoonisachees 4y ago
    Thanks for the tip, unfortunately dxvk was no help. The game is famous for its graphics unstability though, so i just ran it in a windows install.
    - Topgamer7 4y ago
      Vulkan is built into wine these days. Dxvk is separate. See the wiki how to change the renderer: https://wiki.winehq.org/Useful_Registry_Keys https://wiki.winehq.org/Useful_Registry_Keys https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36263 https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36263
gigel82 4y ago
UWP support would be really nice. One of the only remaining reasons I have for keeping Windows around is a (discounted) Game Pass subscription, where all content comes in as "Windows Store" applications. Don't know if that's even feasible.
- Topgamer7 4y ago
  A lot of the winrt libraries are not implement. It will take a considerable amount of time probably. Feasible? Yes, soon? No.

89 points by neustradamus 4y ago

Wine gets better and better, more and more impressive… And here I am having nothing to use it for, because all the software I run or need is now available for Linux. I guess I should be glad, but it still feels a little sad? All that effort someone puts in, for a seemingly ever-decreasing need?

Gigachad 4y ago
Wine, packaged as proton, is essentially the future of gaming on Linux now. Native ports kind of died out as running the Windows build in Proton works better than the native port which would often break after distro updates. It's also a better way of just getting stuff fixed, if there was a bug in the native linux build, you'd have to pester the developers of the game to fix it, while we can assume the windows build works correct so any issue can be fixed by fixing the open source Wine code. Its remarkable that these days you can reasonably expect that just about every game will work flawlessly running in wine.
- asddubs 4y ago
  >while we can assume the windows build works correct haha
- Arnavion 4y ago
  >Native ports kind of died out as running the Windows build in Proton works better than the native port which would often break after distro updates. >Its remarkable that these days you can reasonably expect that just about every game will work flawlessly running in wine. Almost every Windows game I check on ProtonDB has a non-platinum rating because of things like "game starts on a black screen until you blindly press a key" or "ending cutscene doesnt play" or "mouse acceleration doesn't work" or a billion other broken things. Is the game playable despite these issues? Sure it's playable. But the fact is that when game devs ignore Linux users assuming that Proton exists, then there is no incentive for them to fix these issues. Even a playable game today can become completely unplayable tomorrow because of a game update that works fine on Windows. With a native build you get a guarantee from the dev that they'll fix their Linux issues.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    >With a native build you get a guarantee from the dev that they'll fix their Linux issues. This was very much not my experience, games would often be broken if you didn't use ubuntu, or if they were a few years old. And the company wouldn't care because the contractors who ported it are gone. Often even leaving the linux version out of date. While any issue with the Windows one in wine, eventually basically any issue I encounter gets patched by an active team of open source devs, some funded by valve.
    - Arnavion 4y ago
      >This was very much not my experience >While any issue with the Windows one in wine, eventually basically any issue I encounter gets patched by an active team of open source devs, some funded by valve. We don't need to talk about your experience. Pick any game in ProtonDB that has a Platinum rating and you'll find 10 more that are lower because they have the issues I described. >games would often be broken if you didn't use ubuntu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634584
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        I could go to reddit and see every single game I play is buggy, unusable, and broken on Windows. But when I actually play them I see they are essentially perfect. The internet is great at exposing a million issues you'll never encounter yourself, often with undisclosed details about having mods or some extremely non conventional setup causing the problem. The reality is I game entirely on Linux and everything works perfect for me.
        Arnavion 4y ago
        And the reality is that I game entirely on Linux with a mix of Linux-native and Proton games. The Linux-native games work perfectly and the Proton games all have bugs.
        4y ago
haunter 4y ago
>for a seemingly ever-decreasing need I recommend you to read the "Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux" post. Sums up perfectly why Wine is needed and doing perfectly https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ The TLDR is that easier to make games for Windows (single OS and API) and just maintaining Wine/Proton (works across all distros) than actually making a Linux build too of the game. Huge thread when it was posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
- Arnavion 4y ago
  Game developers would be fine to target a single distro like Ubuntu 22.04. And I say that as someone who does not use Ubuntu, because I run Steam in a docker (podman) container of Ubuntu 22.04. It's a common base container for all "closed-source / not from my distro's repos" software - Steam, Discord, etc. The downside is that you have to mount whatever things you want to share from the host, like X11 socket, PulseAudio socket, D-Bus socket, etc. The upside is that you get to share only the things you want to trust the closed-source software with. The other day people were complaining how Discord made their system slow by scanning for game processes; Discord couldn't do that for me because it doesn't know about any processes other than itself.
  - RussianCow 4y ago
    That sounds really interesting, and I'd love to learn more about this. Did you hack something together yourself to allow you to do this, or are you using some software to manage the containers for you?
    - Arnavion 4y ago
      Hacked it together myself. I have a Containerfile with docker.io/library/ubuntu:22.04 base and a RUN step that installs steam + mesa-vulkan-drivers + some other GL and audio libs + 32-bit versions of those, creates a user with the same UID as my user on the host, and adds it to the input group (for controller support). Then I have a `~/.local/bin/steam` script that runs `podman container run --userns=keep-id` with parameters to pass through `/dev/dri` (for GPU), `/dev/input` (for controller), PulseAudio socket, X11 socket, and an empty directory as the home directory. Every week or so when I reboot my PC for updates, I rebuild the container image with whatever is the latest ubuntu base image and other packages at the time. `~/.local/bin/discord` is the same except it doesn't have the controller and GPU stuff, and it has a pre-processing step to download the Linux binary tarball from their website and unpack it into the home directory. I'd share it but it's part of a big private personal repo. I might separate it out into a GitHub Gist or something later.
ww520 4y ago
Run Notepad++.
nix23 4y ago
Sorry for getting downvoted for using native and probably opensource software, welcome to HN.

Gigachad 4y ago

It's been many years since I used wine on its own outside of proton. Is the experience mostly the same? As I understood, proton included slightly newer patches and tools to make games run better, did this stuff mostly make it back upstream? Has anyone attempted running windows games on an Apple Silicon mac yet? How well does that work? I seem to remember 32 bit support being an issue previously.

jszymborski 4y ago
I got Exact Audio Copy running in Wine recently w/o much fuss.
raffraffraff 4y ago
I've used it to ruin MusicBee for years. It has gotten much much better. While it was technically possible to get .net stuff to work, there was a lot of extra hoops to jump through. Now I just download the installer and run it (but I downgrade the main exe t to an older version to get around one annoying bug) The Mac M1 thing though... Nope. The problem is that Wine on ARM becomes Windows ARM. Many (most?) Windows apps a aren't available on that architecture. So you need to user x86 wine.
xkcd-sucks 4y ago
Not for games specifically, but there is a derivative "wine-crossover" that runs 32 bit applications fine on M1, and generally seems to work pretty well (for esoteric scientific instrument software at least, nothing with fancy graphics). See https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine
oso2k 4y ago
For a non-gaming use, I followed Shelby's/TechTagents' [0] guide for setting up an EEPROM programmer in Fedora 36 with Wine. I've been able to backup and flash several EEPROMs for my EMM8088 [1] XT replica, including BIOS, XT-IDE, VGA, RPL. In the old days, I used to use Wine for backing up DVDs with DVDShrink, ripping my CD collection to MP3 players, and playing the Windows version of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory before the NVIDIA drivers became viable on Crux Linux. [0] https://youtu.be/AeZDlz2F8GI https://youtu.be/AeZDlz2F8GI [1] https://www.homebrew8088.com/ https://www.homebrew8088.com/

alphabet9000 4y ago

very grateful to the efforts of everyone involved with Wine

xbar 4y ago
hear, hear...and for the fast turn from 8.0 to 8.1

ropeladder 4y ago

Alas, Foobar2000 has started crashing regularly on me after a few seconds with Wine version 7.19+: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53818 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53818

Arnavion 4y ago
Have you tried deadbeef? It's similar to fb2k, including supporting a lot of the custom printf syntax for displaying and sorting that fb2k has.

zamalek 4y ago

How often does Valve merge Wine into Proton?

Gigachad 4y ago
Looking at the proton release notes, last time they mentioned updating wine was February 2022, updating to Wine 7.0. About a month after Wine 7.0 was released. So they seem somewhat close to upstream. There is also the GE build of proton which is slightly fresher.

themoonisachees 4y ago

Speaking of wine, I've been trying to play simcity (2013) on Debian recently and proton, lutris and bottles have all failed me. If anyone happens to know what I can do to get past the initial black screen I'll take it.

Topgamer7 4y ago
Change the renderer to Vulkan and try.
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  Thanks for the tip, unfortunately dxvk was no help. The game is famous for its graphics unstability though, so i just ran it in a windows install.
  - Topgamer7 4y ago
    Vulkan is built into wine these days. Dxvk is separate. See the wiki how to change the renderer: https://wiki.winehq.org/Useful_Registry_Keys https://wiki.winehq.org/Useful_Registry_Keys https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36263 https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36263

gigel82 4y ago

UWP support would be really nice. One of the only remaining reasons I have for keeping Windows around is a (discounted) Game Pass subscription, where all content comes in as "Windows Store" applications. Don't know if that's even feasible.

Topgamer7 4y ago
A lot of the winrt libraries are not implement. It will take a considerable amount of time probably. Feasible? Yes, soon? No.