7 ms·

Wine 11.0

439 points by zdw 10mo ago

radarroark 9mo ago
Anyone have experience with distributing win32 programs for Linux and/or MacOS by bundling wine? I take it that statically linking is out of the question, but I am guessing you could make an AppImage binary for linux that includes wine, and for MacOS you could include wine in the app bundle. I haven't tried either though. I'm interested in this so I can use win32 as a cross-platform desktop GUI library.
- Rohansi 9mo ago
  I'm curious why you'd want this over using a GUI library that is actually cross-platform? The way you've worded things suggests to me that you're building something new.
  - scotty79 9mo ago
    Visial Studio is quite good for gui.
    - Rohansi 9mo ago
      It is. But if you mean .NET WinForms then you don't really need Wine because Wine uses Mono to run .NET executables. If using WPF then you should check out Avalonia UI [1] which is a cross-platform alternative that is also probably better (and has good tooling in VS). There's also .NET MAUI [2] but it's maybe not as good for desktop apps. [1] https://avaloniaui.net/ https://avaloniaui.net/ [2] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui
  - nxobject 9mo ago
    Perhaps a Windows-only RAD framework? (Admittedly, I can only think of VB6...)
    - nine_k 9mo ago
      Delphi!
  - radarroark 9mo ago
    I want to go back to making desktop programs the way we used to before they turned into web apps that bundled chrome. I know I should just use Qt but I have some experience already with win32, and all the programs I have fond memories of are written with it (foobar2000, winamp, Everything, etc).
    - swinglock 9mo ago
      Win32 and Wine being a lightweight alternative to HTML and Electrum is a fun idea.
      - Rohansi 9mo ago
        Wine is going to require at least as much disk space as Electron. Performance and memory usage should at least be better though.
    - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
      Have you considered Tk? Visually, it's quite like Win32, but it's fully cross-platform and (as of Tcl 9.0) has basic screen-reader support – so no mucking around with OLEACC shims or IAccessible2, as you'd need for COMCTL32. And it supports virtually everything Win32 does, with the ability to drop down to platform-specific sorcery (i.e., Win32) if the need arises.
    - purerandomness 9mo ago
      You might like https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
    - badsectoracula 9mo ago
      Someone else mentioned Lazarus, though that is Object/Free Pascal, not C/C++. The API is based on VCL for Delphi which was designed for the Windows API and even though Lazarus is cross-platform and can use multiple backends (actually i've been playing with writing a FLTK backend[0], though it is in primitive stages and FLTK doesn't really like exposing much of its guts), the API has some windows-isms (e.g. colors are 4 bytes where one byte is used a special marker to indicate system colors, just like in Windows) and the backends even have to implement a small subset of the Windows API to work :-P. An alternative in C++ would be wxWidgets which has some (light) MFC inspirations, again feeling somewhat Windowsy though not full-on MFC/Win32 since from the beginning it had to work with X Windows / Motif in addition to Win32 (and AFAIK, the Motif backend still works). Another alternative, even more lightweight would be the aforementioned FLTK. FLTK is also designed to be statically linked with your program (though it can be linked dynamically too if you want) so it only relies on common system libraries (as an example the screenshot in [0] relies only on the C library, the C++ library -because it is needed by FLTK and it is possible to also statically link to that too- and common X11 libraries like libX11, libXft, etc that existed on any Linux desktop system for decades now -- FLTK can also support Wayland, though i haven't tested that). [0] https://i.imgur.com/W6XbLkr.png https://i.imgur.com/W6XbLkr.png
  - dfabulich 9mo ago
    Because, as they always say, Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.
- cmxch 9mo ago
  Depending on the use case, you might be able to get away with PowerShell with Pinvoke bindings if your code is more script-like than compiled code. Instead of making your own GUI library, you could just make a shim that translates to whatever framework you want to support. See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-interop/pinvoke https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-int...
- circuit10 9mo ago
  Winelib sounds like what you’re describing about static linking: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-Guide https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G...
  - Rayosay 9mo ago
    As someone who has tried this, I agree that Winelib is the way to go. Just don't go into it expecting it to "just work" without any code changes. Since NTFS is case-insensitive, it's likely that you'll have to fix your include paths to use the right case. If you used any MSVC compiler extensions, you'll likely need to modify your code to not use them or add `#ifdef __GNUC__` with alternative implementations for GCC. GCC's `-fms-extensions` can emulate some of them, but not all. Winemaker can help you with some of the more wrote aspects of this conversion, but not all of it. It will also produce Makefiles for you, but if you want a single build system that works on all platforms, I'd recommend that you use CMake with a CMake toolchain file targeting Winelib and `winegcc` instead. Visual Studio has pretty good CMake support these days, so it should look pretty much like any other Visual Studio solution when you open it there too. Once you do get it working, you'll notice that on first run of your application Wine will create a `~/.wine` directory and populate it just like it would if you created a new Wine prefix to run a standard Windows application in. Other than that, it will feel pretty seamless. You'll even get a native application launcher for it (which is really just a shell script to run your project's `.exe` under Wine, but it's hidden from the user so it feels native if you don't look too closely.) Compiling against Winelib has the added benefit that you'll only be using win32 features that Wine supports, and can use native platform libraries (if you choose to do so when you're compiling your application, as described in the Winelib User's Guide) mixed with Windows libraries from Wine. It's nicer and works more smoothly than just running a Windows application you compiled with Visual Studio under a bundled version of Wine, in my experience. I'm sure that you'd be able to bundle it as an AppImage, but I haven't actually tried that part myself. Good luck!
- foresto 9mo ago
  You might consider Flatpak packaging. Flathub offers the org.winehq.Wine package, which you can use in the base and base-version fields of your own package's manifest. It wouldn't cause your code to be statically linked with Wine. Your package could then be distributed from your own flatpak remote. There was an announcement about a year ago of an effort to make a paid flatpak market, apparently to be called Flathub LLC. I don't know if that effort is still active. https://discourse.flathub.org/t/request-for-proposals-flathub-program-management/8276 https://discourse.flathub.org/t/request-for-proposals-flathu... Winelib might also be worth considering, depending on how you are able to navigate the relevant licenses. https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-Guide#legal-issues https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G... I think Qt would yield better results than Wine for most things. Since your comment suggests that you're making proprietary software, you would have to take special care with linking or else submit to the Qt Group's commercial license terms.
  - TingPing 9mo ago
    Most people can use the LGPL version of Qt.
    - nomel 9mo ago
      "People" or "professionals"? Our legal department said we had to buy licenses.
      - zekica 9mo ago
        Both. LGPL doesn't distinguish between commercial and non-commercial use.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        nomel 9mo ago
        Sure, but there's a clear practical difference. Most professionals don't have the agency or company backing to allow LGPL, with their companies source code. Most personal users do.
- transcriptase 9mo ago
  That sounds antithetical to the “never just works” philosophy of Linux software.
- mid-kid 9mo ago
  I've seen a few russian pirated game releases for linux do this, they just bundle a copy of wine (downloaded from the same places as e.g. lutris gets it from), and a start script that sets the WINEPREFIX variable to a pre-populated prefix, with the game already installed and all the needed registry configurations already present. I suppose you could bundle all this in an AppImage, the annoying part however is that the WINEPREFIX is supposed to be read-write, so you'd have to set it to some place specific to your app, to avoid messing with the user's main prefix. These prefixes are huge (hundreds of MB upon creation), so I'm not sure I'd consider this a desireable solution. If this is your distribution method, consider having the user install wine before running your app.
- darthcircuit 9mo ago
  Check out GameImage! https://github.com/gameimage/gameimage https://github.com/gameimage/gameimage This started out with bundling wine in appimages, but is expanded a lot. The author created a new appimage alternative that adds some stuff to make games work more reliably. I’ve used this several times to create portable versions of old windows games for my Steam Deck. It’s awesome!
- kccqzy 9mo ago
  I don’t have experience but I have heard of winelib which is a library implementing Win32 APIs. I suppose you don’t compile your code as PE executable, but compile to Linux natively while dynamically linking to winelib.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- treesknees 9mo ago
  For MacOS there is Sikarugir (formerly Wineskin.) It lets you bundle a win32 program with a wine runtime as a .app https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir https://github.com/vitor251093/wineskin https://github.com/vitor251093/wineskin
sbinnee 9mo ago
I didn't know about WoW64 mode. I remember when trying to install an old windows program I had to install a bunch of 32-bit translation library for audio and stuff. This WoW64 means that I can just simply use 64-bit arch. This is fabulous. WoW64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64
- TMWNN 9mo ago
  Is the MacOS equivalent what was deprecated in Catalina, ending compatibility with 32-bit applications?
  - kcb 9mo ago
    Crossover maintained compatibility with 32-bit windows applications even after Catalina. > https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrating-the-difficult-the-release-of-crossover-19 https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrati... Which is kind of funny because yet again windows was a better application in terms of longevity than MacOS native.
  - wat10000 9mo ago
    It's a bit different. WOW64 is a compatibility layer that intercepts calls into system libraries from 32-bit apps and translates them into calls to 64-bit libraries. macOS shipped both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all system libraries, no translation involved.
    - mr-ron 9mo ago
      Seems like also 16bit apps????
      - throwaway2046 9mo ago
        Yes, as of Wine 10.16 (the version number is a lucky coincidence!) 16-bit Windows applications can run on 64-bit Linux without any special libraries.
      - 9mo ago
mschuster91 9mo ago
> NT system calls use the same syscall numbering as recent Windows, to support applications that hardcode syscall numbers. Other than antivirus software and maybe MAYBE kernel-level "anticheat" slop - who in their right mind does straight syscalls to the kernel?
- tux3 9mo ago
  Userland DRMs do all sort of nonsense. Kernel anticheats wouldn't use the syscalls, they're already able to call the kernel routines they want directly.
- StrauXX 9mo ago
  Some programming language compilers generate asm that does call systemcalls directly. Go for example.
  - teraflop 9mo ago
    Go does hardcode system call numbers on Linux, but it doesn't on Windows. Instead it follows the normal Windows convention of calling the userspace wrappers from kernel32.dll and similar libraries. https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.25.6:src/syscall/zsyscall_windows.go https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.25.6:src/... Unlike on Linux, the low-level syscall numbers on the NT kernel are highly unstable across releases, so programs that try to call them directly will generally only work on a very specific kernel version.
    - nasretdinov 9mo ago
      I wonder if due to C slowly fading away things like syscall ABI, kernel numbers, etc, will start getting more stable, not just on Windows but on macOS too
      - mschuster91 9mo ago
        There still needs to be a cause for working directly with the kernel interface instead of going via the userland interfaces (libc on Linux, kernel32/user32 on Windows, macOS frameworks) to justify the required effort, and the use cases are basically only DRM, malware, malware detectors and anti-cheat.
snarfy 9mo ago
Hats off to the Wine team for all the amazing work! Myself and I'm sure many others wouldn't be able to switch to Linux without you. Thank you!
- sevensor 9mo ago
  > 16-bit applications are supported in the new WoW64 mode. I’d like to thank them for this, specifically! I had some old applications that weren’t working in the old WoW mode.
  - snvzz 9mo ago
    The funny thing (or actually sad) is Windows cannot run win16 anymore.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - M95D 9mo ago
      It was since Win XP 64bit, ~20 years ago.
      - themaks 9mo ago
        You could run win16 apps on Windows 10 32bits though (supported until May 2020) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/ntvdm-and-16-bit-app-support https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/ntvd...
        hulitu 9mo ago
        > win16 apps on Windows 10 32bits though Which was only installed for special purposes. The majority had Win10 64
  - vintagedave 9mo ago
    This is amazing. I may be asking too much here, but does this mean you can run Win16 apps on ARM, eg macOS?
lordleft 9mo ago
Truly amazing software. I only recently learned that Crossover, which enables running windows software (mainly games) on MacOS, is built on Wine and significantly contributes to Wine Development.
- ekianjo 9mo ago
  Crossover is made by Codeweavers who are the devs of Wine.
  - tomnipotent 9mo ago
    They're also responsible for Proton in collaboration with Valve. Codeweavers CTO has been project lead of Wine for three decades.
    - ekianjo 9mo ago
      > responsible for Proton Part of Proton only. Proton is a mix of various projects. Esync, Fsync, Wine, DXVK, and more... > Codeweavers CTO Yes Julliard is very famous and key to the project
      - tomnipotent 9mo ago
        > Proton is a mix of various projects They didn't magically get bundled together. Proton still has a substantial amount of engineering behind it.
        embedding-shape 9mo ago
        I think the point was that there is way more people involved in Proton that the people/work coming from Wine, not to trivialise the amount of work integrating a bunch of projects take.
        ekianjo 9mo ago
        Yes. Wine for one never had a high performance DX11 rendererer and DXVK was a revolution for gaming.
shmerl 9mo ago
Congrats on ntsync and new wow64 support! Those are two huge features released last year. ntsync allows efficient and correct synchronization usage that matches logic of Windows and new wow64 allows running 32-bit Windows programs without 32-bit Linux dependencies.
- kccqzy 9mo ago
  I’ve always installed both wine and wine-32bit on Linux. Does this mean I can now delete wine-32bit after this?
  - shmerl 9mo ago
    Yes, I think up to date wine simply build dropped wine vs wine64 difference. You can check winehq builds.
bastawhiz 9mo ago
This is all amazing work. Is there a list of applications/games that previously didn't work that now do (like what Dolphin puts out)? I'd love to understand what the improvements mean in a practical sense.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
  They usually include this info in the point releases[0]. It would be far too much to fit in the 11.0 release notes [0] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases
  - yshui 9mo ago
    see also the proton release notes: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/releases https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/releases
eek2121 9mo ago
While I agree that it is amazing work, I feel the need to call out the wine team because, as many likely know, a redditor (admittedly of unknown origin, to me at least) felt the need to go to Valve prior to the wine team. Valve, of course, kicked the PR back over to the wine team, which I actually think is fine. The issue, I think, "may possibly" be the wine team. The PR was well documented, does not initially appear to be related to AI, and it makes a PITA installer work FFS. Further, my own PRs to wine were accepted for less decades ago and are still in use now. Forgive the rant, however the redditor in question was scared to send the PR to Wine due to politics. That tells me there is definitely too much middle management in an open source project.
- skissane 9mo ago
  I am sure I am not the only person who has no idea what you are talking about. Do you have a link to the PR?
  - MrPowerGamerBR 9mo ago
    Pretty sure it is this one: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310 Some news outlets did report on it. However, in my experience after testing the patch applied on top of Wine 11.0, both the Creative Cloud and the Photoshop installer did not work. I suppose that the thing that the patch fixes is the "offline" Photoshop installers, which are not provided anymore unless if you ask Adobe nicely... or if you get it from third party sources. The PR's creator did say that they didn't pay for Creative Cloud, so I think it is likely that this is what happened. This made me wonder if anyone had actually tested the patches with a legit Creative Cloud/Photoshop installer, or if everyone just ran with the PR saying "look it works now!!!" but nobody bothered to actually test it. The creator did submit their own precompiled Wine version, however that version is meant to be run via Proton, so I wasn't able to make it work because I don't know how to run things via Proton outside of Steam. I was able to get the Creative Cloud app in Wine (set to Windows 10 mode) by using some very dubious methods, as in, I asked Claude Code to implement the stub to see what would happen because if AI is sooo good as how people are saying, it should be able to fix things in Wine... right? And surprisingly, it did actually work. However you aren't able to use Photoshop CC 2021 (the earliest Photoshop version you can install from Creative Cloud, newer versions crash during startup) because the activation popup does not render the input controls. The reason why I think it is trying to render something is because the activation popup background does have the same color as the Adobe website and, if my memory is correct, in Windows that popup is used to ask for your Adobe account credentials. (Sadly the PR patch does not fix the activation screen) Of course, if you bypass the activation using... alternatives means, Photoshop CC 2021 does work under Wine, which is why you can find a lot of "Photoshop CC 2021 in Wine!" repositories on GitHub. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qdgd73/i_made_adobe_cc_installers_work_on_linux_pr_in/o04dxtd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qdgd73/i_mad... https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57980 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57980
1hackaday 9mo ago
Is Wine ever going to be able to run the current version of Microsoft Office? This is the main app keeping people in Windows.
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  The "current" version is a cloud-encumbered MS365 product with Copilot+ integration, so probably not. That being said, apparently the 2016 version is gold-rated on WineHQ: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=10 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
  - venusenvy47 9mo ago
    Our company just deployed Office 2024, which is not cloud-based. There are plenty of companies that can't/won't use the cloud version.
    - hedora 9mo ago
      They said “cloud encumbered” not cloud based. Do you have a version that doesn’t prompt users to use cloud services, and also does not attempt to make outgoing network calls? I jumped off the MS train about ten years ago, but the office they shipped back then was already cloud encumbered.
  - accrual 9mo ago
    I find Office 2016 feels rather similar to current Office 365 as well. For home office stuff I'd never notice the difference.
  - Ballas 9mo ago
    That gold rating was last tested with wine 5.0 in 2020. I have tried many times to install Office 2016 after that, and failed because Microsoft keeps changing their login/activation front-end. The last time the issue was with some Edge-dependency. For a while it was possible to get it working with Crossover, and then it broke again. Currently I'm using WinApps for the infrequent project that requires MS Office. That said, I haven't tried Office on wine in the last 2 years, and there have a lot of development in that time...
rkagerer 9mo ago
Any chance this will improve Solidworks support?
unsupp0rted 9mo ago
Every few years I try Wine for whatever app or game and it spits out some obscure error messages I have to Google, and the suggestion is to recompile this or that, after downloading some DLLs from a random Russian honeypot on Yandex. Is it better now?
- notachatbot123 9mo ago
  Yes, whatever works well for me.
- guenthert 9mo ago
  Not all functionality is perfectly replicated, so the user experience depends on the application being used. I use it semi-regularly for quite a number of years and (consequently) various versions of Wine to run (a near current version of) LTspice. That works perfectly as far as I can tell, but it is my understanding that the maintainer of LTspice puts in some effort to assure compatibility with the then current version of Wine.
- nasretdinov 9mo ago
  As a Russian I do feel a little bit of pride whenever people complain about something like this. Not hugely proud because you're using it in a negative light, but still proud nevertheless :)
- CodesInChaos 9mo ago
  In my experience most games that don't use an anti-hack just work (probably around 95%). Occasionally a bit of tweaking is needed. * Probably the biggest pain point for me are game launchers that use Edge WebView 2. But many games allow you to bypass the launcher. * For DOS Games run native DOSBox and not the Windows Version inside Wine/Proton * Install the games on a native Linux partition. Having the wine prefix on NTFS will cause weird issues. * Use a tool like Heroic Launcher or Lutris for non-steam games. Especially for GOG games. Applications on the other hand have problems far more often. Some don't work at all, others have bugs and limitations.

439 points by zdw 10mo ago

Anyone have experience with distributing win32 programs for Linux and/or MacOS by bundling wine? I take it that statically linking is out of the question, but I am guessing you could make an AppImage binary for linux that includes wine, and for MacOS you could include wine in the app bundle. I haven't tried either though. I'm interested in this so I can use win32 as a cross-platform desktop GUI library.

Rohansi 9mo ago
I'm curious why you'd want this over using a GUI library that is actually cross-platform? The way you've worded things suggests to me that you're building something new.
- scotty79 9mo ago
  Visial Studio is quite good for gui.
  - Rohansi 9mo ago
    It is. But if you mean .NET WinForms then you don't really need Wine because Wine uses Mono to run .NET executables. If using WPF then you should check out Avalonia UI [1] which is a cross-platform alternative that is also probably better (and has good tooling in VS). There's also .NET MAUI [2] but it's maybe not as good for desktop apps. [1] https://avaloniaui.net/ https://avaloniaui.net/ [2] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui
- nxobject 9mo ago
  Perhaps a Windows-only RAD framework? (Admittedly, I can only think of VB6...)
  - nine_k 9mo ago
    Delphi!
- radarroark 9mo ago
  I want to go back to making desktop programs the way we used to before they turned into web apps that bundled chrome. I know I should just use Qt but I have some experience already with win32, and all the programs I have fond memories of are written with it (foobar2000, winamp, Everything, etc).
  - swinglock 9mo ago
    Win32 and Wine being a lightweight alternative to HTML and Electrum is a fun idea.
    - Rohansi 9mo ago
      Wine is going to require at least as much disk space as Electron. Performance and memory usage should at least be better though.
  - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
    Have you considered Tk? Visually, it's quite like Win32, but it's fully cross-platform and (as of Tcl 9.0) has basic screen-reader support – so no mucking around with OLEACC shims or IAccessible2, as you'd need for COMCTL32. And it supports virtually everything Win32 does, with the ability to drop down to platform-specific sorcery (i.e., Win32) if the need arises.
  - purerandomness 9mo ago
    You might like https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
  - badsectoracula 9mo ago
    Someone else mentioned Lazarus, though that is Object/Free Pascal, not C/C++. The API is based on VCL for Delphi which was designed for the Windows API and even though Lazarus is cross-platform and can use multiple backends (actually i've been playing with writing a FLTK backend[0], though it is in primitive stages and FLTK doesn't really like exposing much of its guts), the API has some windows-isms (e.g. colors are 4 bytes where one byte is used a special marker to indicate system colors, just like in Windows) and the backends even have to implement a small subset of the Windows API to work :-P. An alternative in C++ would be wxWidgets which has some (light) MFC inspirations, again feeling somewhat Windowsy though not full-on MFC/Win32 since from the beginning it had to work with X Windows / Motif in addition to Win32 (and AFAIK, the Motif backend still works). Another alternative, even more lightweight would be the aforementioned FLTK. FLTK is also designed to be statically linked with your program (though it can be linked dynamically too if you want) so it only relies on common system libraries (as an example the screenshot in [0] relies only on the C library, the C++ library -because it is needed by FLTK and it is possible to also statically link to that too- and common X11 libraries like libX11, libXft, etc that existed on any Linux desktop system for decades now -- FLTK can also support Wayland, though i haven't tested that). [0] https://i.imgur.com/W6XbLkr.png https://i.imgur.com/W6XbLkr.png
- dfabulich 9mo ago
  Because, as they always say, Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.
cmxch 9mo ago
Depending on the use case, you might be able to get away with PowerShell with Pinvoke bindings if your code is more script-like than compiled code. Instead of making your own GUI library, you could just make a shim that translates to whatever framework you want to support. See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-interop/pinvoke https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-int...
circuit10 9mo ago
Winelib sounds like what you’re describing about static linking: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-Guide https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G...
- Rayosay 9mo ago
  As someone who has tried this, I agree that Winelib is the way to go. Just don't go into it expecting it to "just work" without any code changes. Since NTFS is case-insensitive, it's likely that you'll have to fix your include paths to use the right case. If you used any MSVC compiler extensions, you'll likely need to modify your code to not use them or add `#ifdef __GNUC__` with alternative implementations for GCC. GCC's `-fms-extensions` can emulate some of them, but not all. Winemaker can help you with some of the more wrote aspects of this conversion, but not all of it. It will also produce Makefiles for you, but if you want a single build system that works on all platforms, I'd recommend that you use CMake with a CMake toolchain file targeting Winelib and `winegcc` instead. Visual Studio has pretty good CMake support these days, so it should look pretty much like any other Visual Studio solution when you open it there too. Once you do get it working, you'll notice that on first run of your application Wine will create a `~/.wine` directory and populate it just like it would if you created a new Wine prefix to run a standard Windows application in. Other than that, it will feel pretty seamless. You'll even get a native application launcher for it (which is really just a shell script to run your project's `.exe` under Wine, but it's hidden from the user so it feels native if you don't look too closely.) Compiling against Winelib has the added benefit that you'll only be using win32 features that Wine supports, and can use native platform libraries (if you choose to do so when you're compiling your application, as described in the Winelib User's Guide) mixed with Windows libraries from Wine. It's nicer and works more smoothly than just running a Windows application you compiled with Visual Studio under a bundled version of Wine, in my experience. I'm sure that you'd be able to bundle it as an AppImage, but I haven't actually tried that part myself. Good luck!
foresto 9mo ago
You might consider Flatpak packaging. Flathub offers the org.winehq.Wine package, which you can use in the base and base-version fields of your own package's manifest. It wouldn't cause your code to be statically linked with Wine. Your package could then be distributed from your own flatpak remote. There was an announcement about a year ago of an effort to make a paid flatpak market, apparently to be called Flathub LLC. I don't know if that effort is still active. https://discourse.flathub.org/t/request-for-proposals-flathub-program-management/8276 https://discourse.flathub.org/t/request-for-proposals-flathu... Winelib might also be worth considering, depending on how you are able to navigate the relevant licenses. https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-Guide#legal-issues https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G... I think Qt would yield better results than Wine for most things. Since your comment suggests that you're making proprietary software, you would have to take special care with linking or else submit to the Qt Group's commercial license terms.
- TingPing 9mo ago
  Most people can use the LGPL version of Qt.
  - nomel 9mo ago
    "People" or "professionals"? Our legal department said we had to buy licenses.
    - zekica 9mo ago
      Both. LGPL doesn't distinguish between commercial and non-commercial use.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - nomel 9mo ago
        Sure, but there's a clear practical difference. Most professionals don't have the agency or company backing to allow LGPL, with their companies source code. Most personal users do.
transcriptase 9mo ago
That sounds antithetical to the “never just works” philosophy of Linux software.
mid-kid 9mo ago
I've seen a few russian pirated game releases for linux do this, they just bundle a copy of wine (downloaded from the same places as e.g. lutris gets it from), and a start script that sets the WINEPREFIX variable to a pre-populated prefix, with the game already installed and all the needed registry configurations already present. I suppose you could bundle all this in an AppImage, the annoying part however is that the WINEPREFIX is supposed to be read-write, so you'd have to set it to some place specific to your app, to avoid messing with the user's main prefix. These prefixes are huge (hundreds of MB upon creation), so I'm not sure I'd consider this a desireable solution. If this is your distribution method, consider having the user install wine before running your app.
darthcircuit 9mo ago
Check out GameImage! https://github.com/gameimage/gameimage https://github.com/gameimage/gameimage This started out with bundling wine in appimages, but is expanded a lot. The author created a new appimage alternative that adds some stuff to make games work more reliably. I’ve used this several times to create portable versions of old windows games for my Steam Deck. It’s awesome!
kccqzy 9mo ago
I don’t have experience but I have heard of winelib which is a library implementing Win32 APIs. I suppose you don’t compile your code as PE executable, but compile to Linux natively while dynamically linking to winelib.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
treesknees 9mo ago
For MacOS there is Sikarugir (formerly Wineskin.) It lets you bundle a win32 program with a wine runtime as a .app https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir https://github.com/vitor251093/wineskin https://github.com/vitor251093/wineskin

sbinnee 9mo ago

I didn't know about WoW64 mode. I remember when trying to install an old windows program I had to install a bunch of 32-bit translation library for audio and stuff. This WoW64 means that I can just simply use 64-bit arch. This is fabulous. WoW64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64

TMWNN 9mo ago
Is the MacOS equivalent what was deprecated in Catalina, ending compatibility with 32-bit applications?
- kcb 9mo ago
  Crossover maintained compatibility with 32-bit windows applications even after Catalina. > https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrating-the-difficult-the-release-of-crossover-19 https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrati... Which is kind of funny because yet again windows was a better application in terms of longevity than MacOS native.
- wat10000 9mo ago
  It's a bit different. WOW64 is a compatibility layer that intercepts calls into system libraries from 32-bit apps and translates them into calls to 64-bit libraries. macOS shipped both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all system libraries, no translation involved.
  - mr-ron 9mo ago
    Seems like also 16bit apps????
    - throwaway2046 9mo ago
      Yes, as of Wine 10.16 (the version number is a lucky coincidence!) 16-bit Windows applications can run on 64-bit Linux without any special libraries.
    - 9mo ago

mschuster91 9mo ago

> NT system calls use the same syscall numbering as recent Windows, to support applications that hardcode syscall numbers. Other than antivirus software and maybe MAYBE kernel-level "anticheat" slop - who in their right mind does straight syscalls to the kernel?

tux3 9mo ago
Userland DRMs do all sort of nonsense. Kernel anticheats wouldn't use the syscalls, they're already able to call the kernel routines they want directly.
StrauXX 9mo ago
Some programming language compilers generate asm that does call systemcalls directly. Go for example.
- teraflop 9mo ago
  Go does hardcode system call numbers on Linux, but it doesn't on Windows. Instead it follows the normal Windows convention of calling the userspace wrappers from kernel32.dll and similar libraries. https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.25.6:src/syscall/zsyscall_windows.go https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.25.6:src/... Unlike on Linux, the low-level syscall numbers on the NT kernel are highly unstable across releases, so programs that try to call them directly will generally only work on a very specific kernel version.
  - nasretdinov 9mo ago
    I wonder if due to C slowly fading away things like syscall ABI, kernel numbers, etc, will start getting more stable, not just on Windows but on macOS too
    - mschuster91 9mo ago
      There still needs to be a cause for working directly with the kernel interface instead of going via the userland interfaces (libc on Linux, kernel32/user32 on Windows, macOS frameworks) to justify the required effort, and the use cases are basically only DRM, malware, malware detectors and anti-cheat.

snarfy 9mo ago

Hats off to the Wine team for all the amazing work! Myself and I'm sure many others wouldn't be able to switch to Linux without you. Thank you!

sevensor 9mo ago
> 16-bit applications are supported in the new WoW64 mode. I’d like to thank them for this, specifically! I had some old applications that weren’t working in the old WoW mode.
- snvzz 9mo ago
  The funny thing (or actually sad) is Windows cannot run win16 anymore.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - M95D 9mo ago
    It was since Win XP 64bit, ~20 years ago.
    - themaks 9mo ago
      You could run win16 apps on Windows 10 32bits though (supported until May 2020) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/ntvdm-and-16-bit-app-support https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/ntvd...
      - hulitu 9mo ago
        > win16 apps on Windows 10 32bits though Which was only installed for special purposes. The majority had Win10 64
- vintagedave 9mo ago
  This is amazing. I may be asking too much here, but does this mean you can run Win16 apps on ARM, eg macOS?

lordleft 9mo ago

Truly amazing software. I only recently learned that Crossover, which enables running windows software (mainly games) on MacOS, is built on Wine and significantly contributes to Wine Development.

ekianjo 9mo ago
Crossover is made by Codeweavers who are the devs of Wine.
- tomnipotent 9mo ago
  They're also responsible for Proton in collaboration with Valve. Codeweavers CTO has been project lead of Wine for three decades.
  - ekianjo 9mo ago
    > responsible for Proton Part of Proton only. Proton is a mix of various projects. Esync, Fsync, Wine, DXVK, and more... > Codeweavers CTO Yes Julliard is very famous and key to the project
    - tomnipotent 9mo ago
      > Proton is a mix of various projects They didn't magically get bundled together. Proton still has a substantial amount of engineering behind it.
      - embedding-shape 9mo ago
        I think the point was that there is way more people involved in Proton that the people/work coming from Wine, not to trivialise the amount of work integrating a bunch of projects take.
        ekianjo 9mo ago
        Yes. Wine for one never had a high performance DX11 rendererer and DXVK was a revolution for gaming.

shmerl 9mo ago

Congrats on ntsync and new wow64 support! Those are two huge features released last year. ntsync allows efficient and correct synchronization usage that matches logic of Windows and new wow64 allows running 32-bit Windows programs without 32-bit Linux dependencies.

kccqzy 9mo ago
I’ve always installed both wine and wine-32bit on Linux. Does this mean I can now delete wine-32bit after this?
- shmerl 9mo ago
  Yes, I think up to date wine simply build dropped wine vs wine64 difference. You can check winehq builds.

bastawhiz 9mo ago

This is all amazing work. Is there a list of applications/games that previously didn't work that now do (like what Dolphin puts out)? I'd love to understand what the improvements mean in a practical sense.

OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
They usually include this info in the point releases[0]. It would be far too much to fit in the 11.0 release notes [0] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/releases
- yshui 9mo ago
  see also the proton release notes: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/releases https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/releases

eek2121 9mo ago

While I agree that it is amazing work, I feel the need to call out the wine team because, as many likely know, a redditor (admittedly of unknown origin, to me at least) felt the need to go to Valve prior to the wine team. Valve, of course, kicked the PR back over to the wine team, which I actually think is fine. The issue, I think, "may possibly" be the wine team. The PR was well documented, does not initially appear to be related to AI, and it makes a PITA installer work FFS. Further, my own PRs to wine were accepted for less decades ago and are still in use now. Forgive the rant, however the redditor in question was scared to send the PR to Wine due to politics. That tells me there is definitely too much middle management in an open source project.

skissane 9mo ago
I am sure I am not the only person who has no idea what you are talking about. Do you have a link to the PR?
- MrPowerGamerBR 9mo ago
  Pretty sure it is this one: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/wine/pull/310 Some news outlets did report on it. However, in my experience after testing the patch applied on top of Wine 11.0, both the Creative Cloud and the Photoshop installer did not work. I suppose that the thing that the patch fixes is the "offline" Photoshop installers, which are not provided anymore unless if you ask Adobe nicely... or if you get it from third party sources. The PR's creator did say that they didn't pay for Creative Cloud, so I think it is likely that this is what happened. This made me wonder if anyone had actually tested the patches with a legit Creative Cloud/Photoshop installer, or if everyone just ran with the PR saying "look it works now!!!" but nobody bothered to actually test it. The creator did submit their own precompiled Wine version, however that version is meant to be run via Proton, so I wasn't able to make it work because I don't know how to run things via Proton outside of Steam. I was able to get the Creative Cloud app in Wine (set to Windows 10 mode) by using some very dubious methods, as in, I asked Claude Code to implement the stub to see what would happen because if AI is sooo good as how people are saying, it should be able to fix things in Wine... right? And surprisingly, it did actually work. However you aren't able to use Photoshop CC 2021 (the earliest Photoshop version you can install from Creative Cloud, newer versions crash during startup) because the activation popup does not render the input controls. The reason why I think it is trying to render something is because the activation popup background does have the same color as the Adobe website and, if my memory is correct, in Windows that popup is used to ask for your Adobe account credentials. (Sadly the PR patch does not fix the activation screen) Of course, if you bypass the activation using... alternatives means, Photoshop CC 2021 does work under Wine, which is why you can find a lot of "Photoshop CC 2021 in Wine!" repositories on GitHub. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qdgd73/i_made_adobe_cc_installers_work_on_linux_pr_in/o04dxtd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qdgd73/i_mad... https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57980 https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57980

1hackaday 9mo ago

Is Wine ever going to be able to run the current version of Microsoft Office? This is the main app keeping people in Windows.

bigyabai 9mo ago
The "current" version is a cloud-encumbered MS365 product with Copilot+ integration, so probably not. That being said, apparently the 2016 version is gold-rated on WineHQ: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=10 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
- venusenvy47 9mo ago
  Our company just deployed Office 2024, which is not cloud-based. There are plenty of companies that can't/won't use the cloud version.
  - hedora 9mo ago
    They said “cloud encumbered” not cloud based. Do you have a version that doesn’t prompt users to use cloud services, and also does not attempt to make outgoing network calls? I jumped off the MS train about ten years ago, but the office they shipped back then was already cloud encumbered.
- accrual 9mo ago
  I find Office 2016 feels rather similar to current Office 365 as well. For home office stuff I'd never notice the difference.
- Ballas 9mo ago
  That gold rating was last tested with wine 5.0 in 2020. I have tried many times to install Office 2016 after that, and failed because Microsoft keeps changing their login/activation front-end. The last time the issue was with some Edge-dependency. For a while it was possible to get it working with Crossover, and then it broke again. Currently I'm using WinApps for the infrequent project that requires MS Office. That said, I haven't tried Office on wine in the last 2 years, and there have a lot of development in that time...

rkagerer 9mo ago

Any chance this will improve Solidworks support?

unsupp0rted 9mo ago

Every few years I try Wine for whatever app or game and it spits out some obscure error messages I have to Google, and the suggestion is to recompile this or that, after downloading some DLLs from a random Russian honeypot on Yandex. Is it better now?

notachatbot123 9mo ago
Yes, whatever works well for me.
guenthert 9mo ago
Not all functionality is perfectly replicated, so the user experience depends on the application being used. I use it semi-regularly for quite a number of years and (consequently) various versions of Wine to run (a near current version of) LTspice. That works perfectly as far as I can tell, but it is my understanding that the maintainer of LTspice puts in some effort to assure compatibility with the then current version of Wine.
nasretdinov 9mo ago
As a Russian I do feel a little bit of pride whenever people complain about something like this. Not hugely proud because you're using it in a negative light, but still proud nevertheless :)
CodesInChaos 9mo ago
In my experience most games that don't use an anti-hack just work (probably around 95%). Occasionally a bit of tweaking is needed. * Probably the biggest pain point for me are game launchers that use Edge WebView 2. But many games allow you to bypass the launcher. * For DOS Games run native DOSBox and not the Windows Version inside Wine/Proton * Install the games on a native Linux partition. Having the wine prefix on NTFS will cause weird issues. * Use a tool like Heroic Launcher or Lutris for non-steam games. Especially for GOG games. Applications on the other hand have problems far more often. Some don't work at all, others have bugs and limitations.