14 ms·

Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

1306 points by felineflock 7mo ago

kapija 7mo ago
awesome, finally wine is getting proper ntsync support... and i reckon wow64 will let me run so many old games...
dinkblam 7mo ago
it seems if you want the same on macOS, this is the place to contribute: https://github.com/Alien4042x/Wine-NTsync-Userspace-macOS-backend https://github.com/Alien4042x/Wine-NTsync-Userspace-macOS-ba...
- yjftsjthsd-h 7mo ago
  That's interesting. I thought the point was that it needed to be in-kernel for performance reasons; if it works in userspace why did linux not do that?
  - kelnos 7mo ago
    Ideally it does need to be in-kernel for performance reasons. But that's not possible on macOS, so it's better to have it in userspace than not at all.
- hungryhobbit 7mo ago
  But does anyone care about MacOS? ;) I mean, I know Mac has had some great games (eg. I spent so much time on school Macs playing that Bolo tank game) ... but they have probably <1% of the number of games Windows has. I'd expect a simiilar percentage of devs to be interested in Mace (or whatever you call Mac Wine).
  - kelnos 7mo ago
    Not sure what you mean. The number of Mac games isn't relevant to a subthread about a project to increase performance when Windows games on Mac.
ticulatedspline 7mo ago
Wine might be oddly self-defeating. Broad game support on Linux increases the viability of Linux as a desktop, which increases market share, which may result in developers creating Linux ports as a 1st class concern, which don't need Wine to run.
- Normal_gaussian 7mo ago
  A solution to itself
- jfaulken 7mo ago
  This is the very definition of "a good problem to have."
- p_ing 7mo ago
  OS/2 part deux
  - ssl-3 7mo ago
    Sorta, kinda, but not really. OS/2 may have been a better Windows than Windows during the Warp days 30-ish years ago. It was also a very competent operating system in its own right. We all know the story: It never had a broad base of native applications. It could have happened, but it did not happen. Like, back then when Usenet was the primary way of conducting written online discourse, the best newsreader I had on OS/2 was a Windows program; the ones that ran natively on OS/2 weren't even close. And OS/2 never had support from a popular company. There were times at OS/2's peak (such as it was) when it was essentially impossible to buy a new computer with OS/2 pre-installed and working correctly even from IBM. Linux, though? Over those same 30-ish years, a huge amount of native applications have been written. Tons of day-to-day stuff can be done very well in Linux without even a hint of Wine and that's been reality for quite a long time now. The missing piece, if there is one, is gaming. It'd be great to have more native games and fewer abstraction layers. But systems like Valve's popular Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine are positive aspects that OS/2 never had an equivalent to. And since Steam is very nearly ubiquitous, companies that sell computer game software do pay attention to what Valve is doing in this space. (And frankly, when a game runs great in some Steam/Wine/Proton/Vulkan shapeshifting slime mold abstraction stack, I really do not care that it isn't running natively. I push the button and receive candy.)
adelmotsjr 7mo ago
Reading these posts always make me feel like an imposter. People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.
- brailsafe 7mo ago
  Start working through the layers! It's incredibly rewarding to go from just typical day job stuff to understanding bits and pieces of esoteric low level implementation. One level at a time, it's not that bad, although it is hard and takes effort. I know next to nothing either, but having felt the same way a few years ago, these kind of posts now at least excite me instead of just intimidate.
- eurg 7mo ago
  All good. I tell people how to add another mailbox to their Outlook, "click here, now there". Not glorious. Necessary anyways.
- huflungdung 7mo ago
  [dead]
- DeathArrow 7mo ago
  >People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs. CRUDs do pay the bills.
- zerr 7mo ago
  The grass is always greener on the other side - many low-level programmers feel like an imposter when it comes to high-level systems such as CRUD apps.
  - irishcoffee 7mo ago
    They don't. The "simplicity" of using a "high-level" framework for someone who bit-shifts for a living is almost comical.
    - 7mo ago
freediddy 7mo ago
[flagged]
- bmenrigh 7mo ago
  No, the gains here aren't very dramatic when compared properly (against fsync), and have nothing to do with AI help. The gains come down to Linux kernel support for certain synchronization primitives like the Mutex on Windows, such that there is a more direct mapping of what a Windows binary expects to what the Linux kernel provides. See https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html for the kernel support that makes this possible.
hu3 7mo ago
> Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS > Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS > Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS > Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS Amazing. I don't understand the low level details on how such a massive speed gain was ripe for the picking but I welcome! I guess thanks Valve for pouring money into Proton.
- bmenrigh 7mo ago
  Those benchmark numbers are slightly misleading, as they are a comparison of Wine+ntsync against Wine+nothing. There has been a somewhat fast "fsync" library built around Linux's futex and the gains over Wine+fsync are modest (just a few % in most cases). That said, Wine+ntsync is still a win, just not a 8x improvement like the Dirt 3 benchmark suggests. (And it case it's not clear, ntsync is https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html, which is a driver for Linux that offers syncronization primitives (mutex, semaphore, events) that more closely match the semantics of the Windows primitives. It's easier to do a direct implementation in Wine to support code compiled for Windows that expects to be talking to an NT kernel.)
  - creesch 7mo ago
    > There has been a somewhat fast "fsync" library built around Linux's futex The article actually goes into that in quite a bit of detail about that.
    - bmenrigh 7mo ago
      Yeah but to the commenter I was replying to, I don't think it was clear that detail was relevant to the benchmark numbers they were quoting.
  - torginus 7mo ago
    Do they have any other usecase behind Wine? My guess would be MS SQL server, but is that correct?
tombert 7mo 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.
- hxorr 7mo ago
  ReactOS also deserves an honorary mention. A lot of knowledge from that project feeds into Wine.
  - pdpi 7mo ago
    And vice-versa. It's pretty interesting that the two projects haven't kind of merged despite all the collaboration.
    - MisterTea 7mo ago
      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.
      - Induane 7mo ago
        ReactOS periodically rebases some of it's libraries from Wine.
    - badsectoracula 7mo ago
      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-Guidelines https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
brightball 7mo ago
If any Wine devs are reading this, I'd love to see a talk on this topic at the 2026 Carolina Code Conference. Call for Speakers is open until March 31st.
Night_Thastus 7mo ago
I'll be very interested to see how this plays out with final 3rd-party benchmarks. Now if we can just get some decent Nvidia drivers......
- k33n 7mo ago
  What's wrong with the Nvidia drivers for Linux?
  - Duralias 7mo ago
    In practically every benchmark the Linux Nvidia drivers notably underperform compared to the windows driver.
  - Night_Thastus 7mo ago
    They're garbage. They're bad enough that If you have an Nvidia GPU, it's borderline impractical to game on Linux. You can, but you'll be cutting framerates in half or more in many cases.
    - rounce 7mo ago
      That’s a wild exaggeration. Yes they underperform relative to the Windows drivers but my experience is far from “cutting framerates in half” nor “borderline impractical”. I’ve had the last four generations of Nvidia card (currently on 5070Ti) on Linux and played demanding games just fine.
    - braiamp 7mo ago
      The only problem with Nvidia in the last... 5 years was their wayland support and their worse than expected performance for DX12 games. Both of which were being actively worked on, where wayland support has been improving since 2 years ago and DX12 performance needs patches on all the stack, the driver is there, mesa and vkd3d patch are pending.
    - drnick1 7mo ago
      This is not true at all. I game on Linux (Arch, btw) on my 3090 and every game not using some kind of kernel-level anticheat just works. I have never made formal comparisons, but my experience is that I can't notice a difference in performance relative to Windows most of the time. One exception was Helldivers 2, but the performance gap has more or less closed recently with recent Proton versions.
watashiato 7mo ago
Before anyone gets too excited about ntsync, the performance gains are (with few exceptions) mild, usually in the lower single percentage range. These extreme gains are the result of benching against vanilla wine without fsync, anyone playing demanding games on linux would have been doing so using fsync. This is mentioned in the article but treated like a side note. I've been running benchmarks between both and while the performance increase is real, please temper your expectations. A few titles might also run slightly worse.
- akdev1l 7mo ago
  >These extreme gains are the result of benching against vanilla without fsync, which is what anyone gaming on linux uses Not for anyone using a kernel without these patches. Which would be most people.
  - foresto 7mo ago
    Most people? What mainstream Linux distros ship without fsync or esync support?
    - akdev1l 7mo ago
      Well I can tell you that if it didn’t make it upstream Fedora didn’t ship it. It looks there was a copr for a custom kernel-fsync and projects like Bazzite or Nobara are adding patches. From my understanding the fsync patches were never upstreamed.
      - foresto 7mo ago
        The common gaming-focused Wine/Proton builds can also use esync (eventfd-based synchronization). IIRC, it doesn't need a patched kernel. The point being that these massive speed gains will probably not be seen by most people as you suggest, because most Linux gamers already have access to either esync or fsync.
        7mo ago
DeathArrow 7mo ago
While I am not a big gamer anymore, I am curious whether this new Wine release make it possible to run Windows software such as Photoshop or Visual Studio on Linux with decent speed and decent resource usage.
- hungryhobbit 7mo ago
  Linux runs VS Code just fine. If you mean the larger Visual Studio suite ... why on earth would anyone want to run that garbage pile on Linux?
- dmitrygr 7mo ago
  At least for the last decade Visual Studio and Photoshop ran just fine on wine.
  - xuhu 7mo ago
    I hope Photoshop runs in the Linux VM introduced with Android 16, so I can stop carrying a laptop to edit photos and bring just a 0.5kg monitor instead.
SeriousM 7mo ago
Does it finally support visual studio?
- metalliqaz 7mo ago
  the NTSYNC change is for video games, doesn't help VS
  - SeriousM 7mo ago
    Yes, true. And the 64bit support may help visual studio, right?
LetsGetTechnicl 7mo ago
This is such an amazing accomplishment! Absolutely wild to see Linux basically re-implement Windows and doing it better, while MS is dead set on making everything about their software worse.
- jordand 7mo ago
  The full 16bit support here is a big thing especially given 64bit Windows (now everywhere) dropped it. With old games, there's thousands that are 16bit, and even odd cases where the game is 32bit but the installer for it is 16bit.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    The WoW64 including 16 bit support is actually pretty big. Microsoft dropped it years ago.
  - senfiaj 7mo ago
    If I'm not mistaken, 16-bit x86 software cannot naively run in 64-bit mode anyways. It requires an emulator, like DosBox. Wine uses WineVDM. CPU-heavy 16-bit programs, or programs that are sensitive to timing, can be noticeably slower.
  - Dylan16807 7mo ago
    32 bit game with 16 bit installer has a lot of examples, to the point that Windows has workarounds for common installers.
dangoodmanUT 7mo ago
I had to close 3 ads before even half my screen was the article And then it never was more than half…
lifis 7mo ago
It seems like it would be possible to implement this in userspace using shared memory to store the data structures and using just one eventfd per thread to park/unpark (or a futex if not waiting for anything else), which should be fully correct and have similar or faster performance, at the cost of not being secure or robust against process crashes (which isn't a big problem for more Wine usage). It seems that neither esync or fsync do this though - why? Claude thinks that "nobody was motivated enough to write and debug the complex shared-memory waiter-list logic when simpler (if less correct) approaches worked for 95% of games, and when correctness finally mattered enough, the kernel was the more natural place to put it". Is that true?
- evmar 7mo ago
  I don't know the technical details, but the kernel docs say "It exists because implementation in user-space, using existing tools, cannot match Windows performance while offering accurate semantics." https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html
- topspin 7mo ago
  > It seems like it would be possible to implement this in userspace using shared memory It is not. Perhaps this should be possible, but Linux doesn't provide userspace facilities that would be necessary to do this entirely in userspace. This is not merely an API shim that allows Windows binary object to dynamically link and run. It’s an effort to recreate the behavior of NT kernel synchronization and waiting semantics. To do this, Linux kernel synchronization primitives and scheduler API must be used. You can read the code[1] and observe that this is a compatibility adapter that relies heavily on Linux kernel primitives and their coordination with the kernel scheduler. No approach using purely user space synchronization primitives can do this both efficiently and accurately. [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/misc/ntsync.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/misc/n...
  - lifis 7mo ago
    The code doesn't really seem to use any kernel functionality other than spinlocks/mutexes and waiting and waking up tasks. That same code should be portable to userspace by: - Allocating everything into shared memory, where the shared memory fd replaces the ntsync device fd - Using an index into a global table of object pointers instead of object fds - Using futex-based mutexes instead of kernel spinlocks - Using a futex-based parking/unparking system like parking_lot does Obviously this breaks if the shared memory is corrupted or if you SIGKILL any process while it's touching it, but for Wine getting that seems acceptable. A kernel driver is clearly better though for this reason.
sph 7mo ago
I am glad that a portion of the thousands of dollars I've given to Valve Corporation over the years has been gone to improve Wine for everybody. I wonder how many developers and contractors on the project are paid by Valve.
- philipwhiuk 7mo ago
  2/3 of the developers on Wine work for CodeWeavers who have a substantial contract with Valve for Proton (a Wine fork/spin). So most of it.
ptx 7mo ago
Is the difference between the NT-style and POSIX-style semaphores essentially just that NT (and now this new API in Linux) supports setting a max value? Why don't POSIX semaphores support this?
- trentnelson 7mo ago
  WaitForMultipleObjects is fascinating behind the scenes. A single thread can wait on up to 64 independent events, which is done by plumbing the KTHREAD data structure with literally 64 slots for dispatcher header stuff, plus all the supporting Ke/dispatcher logic in the kernel. There’s never been a POSIX equivalent to this. It requires sophisticated kernel support and the exact same parity can’t be achieved in user space alone.
  - modeless 7mo ago
    Yeah I was wondering if some native Linux apps might want to use it, since it is clearly useful and hard to emulate.
    - braiamp 7mo ago
      Linux native semaphores are enough. Linux has been able to be very performant without it. That feature seems like way too over engineered for little gains.
  - gpderetta 7mo ago
    This comes up often, but what can it do that poll can't?
    - dwattttt 7mo ago
      Reading the link provided by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511778, I believe "atomically acquire multiple objects". The link states they try to emulate it by performing a poll then a read, but the gap between those results in a race, which is a terrible thing to have in a synchronisation primitive. There was also something about needing to back out if any of the reads fails to acquire, which also sounds nasty.
evmar 7mo ago
If you're interested in technical notes on how the WoW64 thing works, I dug into Wine and implemented a similar thing in my (far inferior) emulator and wrote about it here, including some links to some Wine resources: https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2023/08/x86-x64-aarch64.html https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2023/08/x86-x64-aarch64....
- vintagedave 7mo ago
  Nice. Highly complex, I’d be interested in reading more posts on how your emulator works too! FYI the link to the Rosetta branch at the end 404s. Maybe change the point to the main repo?
  - evmar 7mo ago
    Hey thanks! I don't mean to hijack this great wine news with my own project, but since you asked, the top of the post has links to more. I will fix the link.
selectively 7mo ago
[flagged]
- kelnos 7mo ago
  Why?
mschuster91 7mo ago
> This might sound like a small quality-of-life improvement, but it's a massive piece of engineering work. The WoW64 mode now handles OpenGL memory mappings, SCSI pass-through, and even 16-bit application support. Yes, 16-bit! If you've got ancient Windows software from the '90s that you need to run for whatever reason, Wine 11 has you covered. Does that also apply to macOS? Even on Intel machines, Apple dropped 32-bit support many many years ago and IIRC it took ugly workarounds that weren't ever part of upstream WINE but of Crossover.
hatmanstack 7mo ago
Anybody know if NTSYNC support is why the Chrome OS team moved away from native Steam support?
Blackthorn 7mo ago
I've heard in the past that ntsync is a big deal for audio plugins via yabridge as well. Not sure how much that's going to reduce the existing CPU penalty there.
oompydoompy74 7mo ago
Not that it really matters, but does this article read as LLM authored to anyone else?
- Twisol 7mo ago
  I saw signs of both human and LLM authorship, so it's probably at least not slop. It did take me out of it a bit though, yes.
mft_ 7mo ago
This is great. Not to sound snarky, but now please get it to run Microsoft Office. I'd argue that this is the last barrier to many, many people being able to use Linux full-time for business purposes.
- SV_BubbleTime 7mo ago
  Entirely. If you really / actually want Linux and Linux Gaming to really take off, contribute with whatever helps to get Office 365 running in Linux without a VM. Like it or not, the business world runs on Office. I have quite a few machines under my direction, and I would drop Windows on every single one of them for employees that have never used Linux in their lives if I could be assured that they had Office and Teams.
  - Levitating 7mo ago
    > Like it or not, the business world runs on Office. Maybe if EU requires local governments to use LibreOffice (or other OSS alternatives like MijnBureau) companies will follow. https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/who-uses-libreoffice/ https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/who-uses-libreoffice/ https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/ https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/
- IshKebab 7mo ago
  I don't know if it is. Most businesses seem to use the web-based Office365 interface now, rather than native Office. I expect the biggest reasons businesses use Windows these days are momentum, and lower support costs (Linux is still less reliably than Windows on real laptop hardware).
  - mft_ 7mo ago
    I work in an area where large heavy collaborative Word documents are very commonplace. I've tried very much to make this work on Linux with the web apps, but they're just not good enough - not feature complete, and quite slow and clunky compared to the native equivalent.
- 7mo ago
mifydev 7mo ago
Hm, speculating a bit, but it feels like NTSYNC is essentially a beginning of NT Subsystem for Linux, or maybe ntoskrnl as a kernel module. Feels like the most clean and fast way to port Windows, since the rest of the interfaces are in the user space in real Windows. Essentially should be almost without overhead: user: [gdi32.dll,user32.dll,kernel32.dll -> ntdll.dll] -> kernel: [ntoskrnl.ko]
gigel82 7mo ago
Support for Xbox Game Pass games (typically deployed as UWP / containerized) would be absolutely amazing and likely the final nail in the coffin for Windows for gaming for many people.
sourcegrift 7mo ago
I'd rather they focus on productivity apps than games. Linux has enough toxic users as it is. I'll praise wine when I can install 12yo office 2014
- 3842056935870 7mo ago
  [dead]
igravious 7mo ago
“And because Proton, SteamOS, and every downstream project builds on top of Wine, those gains trickle down to everyone.” the gains would trickle up, no?
igravious 7mo ago
Here's a link to try it https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/download https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/download
- SeriousM 7mo ago
  Flagged as advertisement
  - SXX 7mo ago
    What advertisement? Codeweavers is literally the company behind Wine. Without them project would never reach point where it is now. Codeweavers developers historically been authors of 2/3 (and likely even more in past) commits in Wine.
  - igravious 7mo ago
    Uh? CodeWeavers : Wine :: IBM/RedHat : Fedora
tuananh 7mo ago
I know that Wine devs are doing most of the hard works but also Valve team for doing the last mile: pushing for better UX, faster patches, pushing adoption (with their Deck device), etc...
pojzon 7mo ago
For someone gaming on linux, is proton or wine currently ahead on the virtualization side? Can we finally ditch windows ?
Nican 7mo ago
I am trying to read this article on my phone without an ad blocker, and it is an impossible challenge. Ads keeps loading and unloading, causing the page to jump around, and lose track of what I was reading. The article is really interesting, but I am actively getting frustrated with my phone.
BatteryMountain 7mo ago
Steam devs if you are reading this: add a checkbox on your checkout screen that will allow me to donate 10% or a flat amount with each purchase, that will go directly to your upstream opensource dependencies like Wine & friends. I would add money to each purchase without blinking to support these people and I think the correct place for this is at the steam checkout screen, in the case for gamers.
- hnarn 7mo ago
  This is a nice idea, but how do you follow through in practice? Who decides what counts as an "upstream dependency", where do you draw the line? Is the Linux kernel included? Are desktop environments included? How do you decide how much of the pot goes to each project, does curl get an equal amount to Wine? Why/why not? As I said, it's a nice idea but I have a feeling the complexity behind making this work well is what might have kept them from doing it.
  - BatteryMountain 7mo ago
    So the steam devs can most likely produce a finite list of all their dependencies. They can then take a day or two to score each one with a weight. Then they use the weights to determine how to split the funds. Or they can have an open source champion person internally that takes care of relationships with opensource projects and can release funds to them as needed. Point is, lets say they accumulate $1M/year this way, it is that person's responsibility to distribute it fully back out to the community. Obviously try to keep it super simple & transparent. They can even ask game developers each quarter who they should think need money or which problems were solved well for them this round, as an extra layer of input.
    - SomeUserName432 7mo ago
      And how would you determine that the buyer intends to play on linux, and not windows like 9x% of the buyers?
      - 7mo ago
Prunkton 7mo ago
so apparently it is Proton GE 10.9 from July'25 adding ntsync support [0]. I'm playing on wine now for several years now, my deepest respect for the developers involved. Thank you! [0]: https://www.linuxcompatible.org/story/geproton109-released/ https://www.linuxcompatible.org/story/geproton109-released/
dmos62 7mo ago
I wish competitive shooters (or rather their anti-cheats) would run on Linux. Only reason left to use Windows.
angelfangs 7mo ago
Running most of my VSTs with wine + yabridge. Amazing that transcription layer/emulation software end up having less issues than running shit native.
alfanick 7mo ago
I would happily pay even a subscription to Wine, if they manage to get Lightroom running smoothly. So far I need to run VM or use a Mac just to do that.
- eb0la 7mo ago
  I would pay if I can use Clip Studio Paint without lag. In fact, I will try another time this easter. If works, I will need to donate.
- beAbU 7mo ago
  Codeweavers.com They'll take your money, and you'll be contributing to wine. It looks like they do commercial wine projects. Might cost more than a coffee a day tho!
  - alfanick 7mo ago
    CrossOver support of Lightroom is just as bad a wine... Realistically it will take $20-50k of dev work to make it work (and some other apps as a side effect).
neonstatic 7mo ago
> Wine 11 is different. This isn't just another yearly release with a few hundred bug fixes and some compatibility tweaks. It represents a huge number of changes and bug fixes. What's the point of being a "journalist", when your job is to write words and instead a machine has written them? What is the point of such a "journalist"? P.S. I am assuming "Lead Technical Editor" falls under the umbrella of "journalist" in some sense
- AdamConwayIE 7mo ago
  Hey, article author here! I've been writing for nearly a decade, and I can assure you, all of this is human written. I've long been writing about the Linux kernel where it's been relevant to my coverage, and there are articles under my name talking about low-level technical aspects in drivers and kernels from as far back as 2017. I get that it's hard to know what to trust out there given that Dead Internet Theory is beginning to feel like a reality, but comments like this can be quite upsetting after spending days researching and writing an article like this. I totally get criticism of the article itself, and I'm fine with that, but it feels as if people are too quick to jump on the "must be written by AI" bandwagon. I receive it, my colleagues receive it, and for the people who I know put in so much effort into their work, it can be upsetting to them as well. As was mentioned in another thread, there were actually a couple of typos in this article when it went live. I cleaned those up once they were pointed out, but AI doesn't make typos. I get it to an extent; hostility and accusations of all kinds have been levied at writers for the years and years I've been in this industry writing long-form content and analysis. But with the proliferation of AI, that hostility has really ramped up over the last couple of years.
  - neonstatic 7mo ago
    Apologies if my post hurt your feelings and I appreciate you taking the time to respond. The writing style in the piece I quoted looked very AI driven to me, that's why I said what I said.
paxrel_ai 7mo ago
[dead]
razkaplan 7mo ago
[flagged]
noisy_boy 7mo ago
If someone is interested in hearing the author Elizabeth Figura's views on Wine and Proton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNBKTolL5oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNBKTolL5oQ
jackhalford 7mo ago
I wonder if having a /dev/ntsync device could make it easier for game devs to compile their games for linux in the first place, instead of having to use wine. There may be other windows specific dependencies though, but this is one less right?
Innoraai 7mo ago
[dead]
brutal_chaos_ 7mo ago
BattleEye kernel module in 3 2...
MagicMoonlight 7mo ago
If we could get Proton for Mac now, it would be amazing.
devwastaken 7mo ago
Wine removed 32-bit support, breaking 90% of programs people used it for.
- hu3 7mo ago
  source? they actually just added 16bit support. Something not even Windows support anymore.
rkagerer 7mo ago
This is awesome news. One application I'd love to see run in Linux is Solidworks. Is there any interest in this, what would be the most effective way to support it financially, and how big a donation do you think it would take to achieve extremely good results? (Or will it forever be stuck in VM's using passthrough GPU's?)
asdaqopqkq 7mo ago
If someone can get the last decent ver. of Excel and Word running on Wine, that would be awesome
vegetable 7mo ago
I predict a massive uptick in linux switchover as soon as installation and activation of some newer ms-office versions (2019, 2021 or 2024) become possible. I think 2019 was the first that shipped with a full fledged power query. In my experience, as of now the one that works best and seamlessly is the 20 year old office 2007.

1306 points by felineflock 7mo ago

awesome, finally wine is getting proper ntsync support... and i reckon wow64 will let me run so many old games...

it seems if you want the same on macOS, this is the place to contribute: https://github.com/Alien4042x/Wine-NTsync-Userspace-macOS-backend https://github.com/Alien4042x/Wine-NTsync-Userspace-macOS-ba...

yjftsjthsd-h 7mo ago
That's interesting. I thought the point was that it needed to be in-kernel for performance reasons; if it works in userspace why did linux not do that?
- kelnos 7mo ago
  Ideally it does need to be in-kernel for performance reasons. But that's not possible on macOS, so it's better to have it in userspace than not at all.
hungryhobbit 7mo ago
But does anyone care about MacOS? ;) I mean, I know Mac has had some great games (eg. I spent so much time on school Macs playing that Bolo tank game) ... but they have probably <1% of the number of games Windows has. I'd expect a simiilar percentage of devs to be interested in Mace (or whatever you call Mac Wine).
- kelnos 7mo ago
  Not sure what you mean. The number of Mac games isn't relevant to a subthread about a project to increase performance when Windows games on Mac.

ticulatedspline 7mo ago

Wine might be oddly self-defeating. Broad game support on Linux increases the viability of Linux as a desktop, which increases market share, which may result in developers creating Linux ports as a 1st class concern, which don't need Wine to run.

Normal_gaussian 7mo ago
A solution to itself
jfaulken 7mo ago
This is the very definition of "a good problem to have."
p_ing 7mo ago
OS/2 part deux
- ssl-3 7mo ago
  Sorta, kinda, but not really. OS/2 may have been a better Windows than Windows during the Warp days 30-ish years ago. It was also a very competent operating system in its own right. We all know the story: It never had a broad base of native applications. It could have happened, but it did not happen. Like, back then when Usenet was the primary way of conducting written online discourse, the best newsreader I had on OS/2 was a Windows program; the ones that ran natively on OS/2 weren't even close. And OS/2 never had support from a popular company. There were times at OS/2's peak (such as it was) when it was essentially impossible to buy a new computer with OS/2 pre-installed and working correctly even from IBM. Linux, though? Over those same 30-ish years, a huge amount of native applications have been written. Tons of day-to-day stuff can be done very well in Linux without even a hint of Wine and that's been reality for quite a long time now. The missing piece, if there is one, is gaming. It'd be great to have more native games and fewer abstraction layers. But systems like Valve's popular Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine are positive aspects that OS/2 never had an equivalent to. And since Steam is very nearly ubiquitous, companies that sell computer game software do pay attention to what Valve is doing in this space. (And frankly, when a game runs great in some Steam/Wine/Proton/Vulkan shapeshifting slime mold abstraction stack, I really do not care that it isn't running natively. I push the button and receive candy.)

adelmotsjr 7mo ago

Reading these posts always make me feel like an imposter. People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.

brailsafe 7mo ago
Start working through the layers! It's incredibly rewarding to go from just typical day job stuff to understanding bits and pieces of esoteric low level implementation. One level at a time, it's not that bad, although it is hard and takes effort. I know next to nothing either, but having felt the same way a few years ago, these kind of posts now at least excite me instead of just intimidate.
eurg 7mo ago
All good. I tell people how to add another mailbox to their Outlook, "click here, now there". Not glorious. Necessary anyways.
huflungdung 7mo ago
[dead]
DeathArrow 7mo ago
>People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs. CRUDs do pay the bills.
zerr 7mo ago
The grass is always greener on the other side - many low-level programmers feel like an imposter when it comes to high-level systems such as CRUD apps.
- irishcoffee 7mo ago
  They don't. The "simplicity" of using a "high-level" framework for someone who bit-shifts for a living is almost comical.
  - 7mo ago

freediddy 7mo ago

[flagged]

bmenrigh 7mo ago
No, the gains here aren't very dramatic when compared properly (against fsync), and have nothing to do with AI help. The gains come down to Linux kernel support for certain synchronization primitives like the Mutex on Windows, such that there is a more direct mapping of what a Windows binary expects to what the Linux kernel provides. See https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html for the kernel support that makes this possible.

hu3 7mo ago

> Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS > Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS > Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS > Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS Amazing. I don't understand the low level details on how such a massive speed gain was ripe for the picking but I welcome! I guess thanks Valve for pouring money into Proton.

bmenrigh 7mo ago
Those benchmark numbers are slightly misleading, as they are a comparison of Wine+ntsync against Wine+nothing. There has been a somewhat fast "fsync" library built around Linux's futex and the gains over Wine+fsync are modest (just a few % in most cases). That said, Wine+ntsync is still a win, just not a 8x improvement like the Dirt 3 benchmark suggests. (And it case it's not clear, ntsync is https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html, which is a driver for Linux that offers syncronization primitives (mutex, semaphore, events) that more closely match the semantics of the Windows primitives. It's easier to do a direct implementation in Wine to support code compiled for Windows that expects to be talking to an NT kernel.)
- creesch 7mo ago
  > There has been a somewhat fast "fsync" library built around Linux's futex The article actually goes into that in quite a bit of detail about that.
  - bmenrigh 7mo ago
    Yeah but to the commenter I was replying to, I don't think it was clear that detail was relevant to the benchmark numbers they were quoting.
- torginus 7mo ago
  Do they have any other usecase behind Wine? My guess would be MS SQL server, but is that correct?

tombert 7mo 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.

hxorr 7mo ago
ReactOS also deserves an honorary mention. A lot of knowledge from that project feeds into Wine.
- pdpi 7mo ago
  And vice-versa. It's pretty interesting that the two projects haven't kind of merged despite all the collaboration.
  - MisterTea 7mo ago
    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.
    - Induane 7mo ago
      ReactOS periodically rebases some of it's libraries from Wine.
  - badsectoracula 7mo ago
    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-Guidelines https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

brightball 7mo ago

If any Wine devs are reading this, I'd love to see a talk on this topic at the 2026 Carolina Code Conference. Call for Speakers is open until March 31st.

Night_Thastus 7mo ago

I'll be very interested to see how this plays out with final 3rd-party benchmarks. Now if we can just get some decent Nvidia drivers......

k33n 7mo ago
What's wrong with the Nvidia drivers for Linux?
- Duralias 7mo ago
  In practically every benchmark the Linux Nvidia drivers notably underperform compared to the windows driver.
- Night_Thastus 7mo ago
  They're garbage. They're bad enough that If you have an Nvidia GPU, it's borderline impractical to game on Linux. You can, but you'll be cutting framerates in half or more in many cases.
  - rounce 7mo ago
    That’s a wild exaggeration. Yes they underperform relative to the Windows drivers but my experience is far from “cutting framerates in half” nor “borderline impractical”. I’ve had the last four generations of Nvidia card (currently on 5070Ti) on Linux and played demanding games just fine.
  - braiamp 7mo ago
    The only problem with Nvidia in the last... 5 years was their wayland support and their worse than expected performance for DX12 games. Both of which were being actively worked on, where wayland support has been improving since 2 years ago and DX12 performance needs patches on all the stack, the driver is there, mesa and vkd3d patch are pending.
  - drnick1 7mo ago
    This is not true at all. I game on Linux (Arch, btw) on my 3090 and every game not using some kind of kernel-level anticheat just works. I have never made formal comparisons, but my experience is that I can't notice a difference in performance relative to Windows most of the time. One exception was Helldivers 2, but the performance gap has more or less closed recently with recent Proton versions.

watashiato 7mo ago

Before anyone gets too excited about ntsync, the performance gains are (with few exceptions) mild, usually in the lower single percentage range. These extreme gains are the result of benching against vanilla wine without fsync, anyone playing demanding games on linux would have been doing so using fsync. This is mentioned in the article but treated like a side note. I've been running benchmarks between both and while the performance increase is real, please temper your expectations. A few titles might also run slightly worse.

akdev1l 7mo ago
>These extreme gains are the result of benching against vanilla without fsync, which is what anyone gaming on linux uses Not for anyone using a kernel without these patches. Which would be most people.
- foresto 7mo ago
  Most people? What mainstream Linux distros ship without fsync or esync support?
  - akdev1l 7mo ago
    Well I can tell you that if it didn’t make it upstream Fedora didn’t ship it. It looks there was a copr for a custom kernel-fsync and projects like Bazzite or Nobara are adding patches. From my understanding the fsync patches were never upstreamed.
    - foresto 7mo ago
      The common gaming-focused Wine/Proton builds can also use esync (eventfd-based synchronization). IIRC, it doesn't need a patched kernel. The point being that these massive speed gains will probably not be seen by most people as you suggest, because most Linux gamers already have access to either esync or fsync.
      - 7mo ago

DeathArrow 7mo ago

While I am not a big gamer anymore, I am curious whether this new Wine release make it possible to run Windows software such as Photoshop or Visual Studio on Linux with decent speed and decent resource usage.

hungryhobbit 7mo ago
Linux runs VS Code just fine. If you mean the larger Visual Studio suite ... why on earth would anyone want to run that garbage pile on Linux?
dmitrygr 7mo ago
At least for the last decade Visual Studio and Photoshop ran just fine on wine.
- xuhu 7mo ago
  I hope Photoshop runs in the Linux VM introduced with Android 16, so I can stop carrying a laptop to edit photos and bring just a 0.5kg monitor instead.

SeriousM 7mo ago

Does it finally support visual studio?

metalliqaz 7mo ago
the NTSYNC change is for video games, doesn't help VS
- SeriousM 7mo ago
  Yes, true. And the 64bit support may help visual studio, right?

LetsGetTechnicl 7mo ago

This is such an amazing accomplishment! Absolutely wild to see Linux basically re-implement Windows and doing it better, while MS is dead set on making everything about their software worse.

jordand 7mo ago
The full 16bit support here is a big thing especially given 64bit Windows (now everywhere) dropped it. With old games, there's thousands that are 16bit, and even odd cases where the game is 32bit but the installer for it is 16bit.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  The WoW64 including 16 bit support is actually pretty big. Microsoft dropped it years ago.
- senfiaj 7mo ago
  If I'm not mistaken, 16-bit x86 software cannot naively run in 64-bit mode anyways. It requires an emulator, like DosBox. Wine uses WineVDM. CPU-heavy 16-bit programs, or programs that are sensitive to timing, can be noticeably slower.
- Dylan16807 7mo ago
  32 bit game with 16 bit installer has a lot of examples, to the point that Windows has workarounds for common installers.

dangoodmanUT 7mo ago

I had to close 3 ads before even half my screen was the article And then it never was more than half…

lifis 7mo ago

It seems like it would be possible to implement this in userspace using shared memory to store the data structures and using just one eventfd per thread to park/unpark (or a futex if not waiting for anything else), which should be fully correct and have similar or faster performance, at the cost of not being secure or robust against process crashes (which isn't a big problem for more Wine usage). It seems that neither esync or fsync do this though - why? Claude thinks that "nobody was motivated enough to write and debug the complex shared-memory waiter-list logic when simpler (if less correct) approaches worked for 95% of games, and when correctness finally mattered enough, the kernel was the more natural place to put it". Is that true?

evmar 7mo ago
I don't know the technical details, but the kernel docs say "It exists because implementation in user-space, using existing tools, cannot match Windows performance while offering accurate semantics." https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/ntsync.html
topspin 7mo ago
> It seems like it would be possible to implement this in userspace using shared memory It is not. Perhaps this should be possible, but Linux doesn't provide userspace facilities that would be necessary to do this entirely in userspace. This is not merely an API shim that allows Windows binary object to dynamically link and run. It’s an effort to recreate the behavior of NT kernel synchronization and waiting semantics. To do this, Linux kernel synchronization primitives and scheduler API must be used. You can read the code[1] and observe that this is a compatibility adapter that relies heavily on Linux kernel primitives and their coordination with the kernel scheduler. No approach using purely user space synchronization primitives can do this both efficiently and accurately. [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/misc/ntsync.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/misc/n...
- lifis 7mo ago
  The code doesn't really seem to use any kernel functionality other than spinlocks/mutexes and waiting and waking up tasks. That same code should be portable to userspace by: - Allocating everything into shared memory, where the shared memory fd replaces the ntsync device fd - Using an index into a global table of object pointers instead of object fds - Using futex-based mutexes instead of kernel spinlocks - Using a futex-based parking/unparking system like parking_lot does Obviously this breaks if the shared memory is corrupted or if you SIGKILL any process while it's touching it, but for Wine getting that seems acceptable. A kernel driver is clearly better though for this reason.

sph 7mo ago

I am glad that a portion of the thousands of dollars I've given to Valve Corporation over the years has been gone to improve Wine for everybody. I wonder how many developers and contractors on the project are paid by Valve.

philipwhiuk 7mo ago
2/3 of the developers on Wine work for CodeWeavers who have a substantial contract with Valve for Proton (a Wine fork/spin). So most of it.

ptx 7mo ago

Is the difference between the NT-style and POSIX-style semaphores essentially just that NT (and now this new API in Linux) supports setting a max value? Why don't POSIX semaphores support this?

trentnelson 7mo ago
WaitForMultipleObjects is fascinating behind the scenes. A single thread can wait on up to 64 independent events, which is done by plumbing the KTHREAD data structure with literally 64 slots for dispatcher header stuff, plus all the supporting Ke/dispatcher logic in the kernel. There’s never been a POSIX equivalent to this. It requires sophisticated kernel support and the exact same parity can’t be achieved in user space alone.
- modeless 7mo ago
  Yeah I was wondering if some native Linux apps might want to use it, since it is clearly useful and hard to emulate.
  - braiamp 7mo ago
    Linux native semaphores are enough. Linux has been able to be very performant without it. That feature seems like way too over engineered for little gains.
- gpderetta 7mo ago
  This comes up often, but what can it do that poll can't?
  - dwattttt 7mo ago
    Reading the link provided by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511778, I believe "atomically acquire multiple objects". The link states they try to emulate it by performing a poll then a read, but the gap between those results in a race, which is a terrible thing to have in a synchronisation primitive. There was also something about needing to back out if any of the reads fails to acquire, which also sounds nasty.

evmar 7mo ago

If you're interested in technical notes on how the WoW64 thing works, I dug into Wine and implemented a similar thing in my (far inferior) emulator and wrote about it here, including some links to some Wine resources: https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2023/08/x86-x64-aarch64.html https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2023/08/x86-x64-aarch64....

vintagedave 7mo ago
Nice. Highly complex, I’d be interested in reading more posts on how your emulator works too! FYI the link to the Rosetta branch at the end 404s. Maybe change the point to the main repo?
- evmar 7mo ago
  Hey thanks! I don't mean to hijack this great wine news with my own project, but since you asked, the top of the post has links to more. I will fix the link.

selectively 7mo ago

[flagged]

kelnos 7mo ago
Why?

mschuster91 7mo ago

> This might sound like a small quality-of-life improvement, but it's a massive piece of engineering work. The WoW64 mode now handles OpenGL memory mappings, SCSI pass-through, and even 16-bit application support. Yes, 16-bit! If you've got ancient Windows software from the '90s that you need to run for whatever reason, Wine 11 has you covered. Does that also apply to macOS? Even on Intel machines, Apple dropped 32-bit support many many years ago and IIRC it took ugly workarounds that weren't ever part of upstream WINE but of Crossover.

hatmanstack 7mo ago

Anybody know if NTSYNC support is why the Chrome OS team moved away from native Steam support?

Blackthorn 7mo ago

I've heard in the past that ntsync is a big deal for audio plugins via yabridge as well. Not sure how much that's going to reduce the existing CPU penalty there.

oompydoompy74 7mo ago

Not that it really matters, but does this article read as LLM authored to anyone else?

Twisol 7mo ago
I saw signs of both human and LLM authorship, so it's probably at least not slop. It did take me out of it a bit though, yes.

mft_ 7mo ago

This is great. Not to sound snarky, but now please get it to run Microsoft Office. I'd argue that this is the last barrier to many, many people being able to use Linux full-time for business purposes.

SV_BubbleTime 7mo ago
Entirely. If you really / actually want Linux and Linux Gaming to really take off, contribute with whatever helps to get Office 365 running in Linux without a VM. Like it or not, the business world runs on Office. I have quite a few machines under my direction, and I would drop Windows on every single one of them for employees that have never used Linux in their lives if I could be assured that they had Office and Teams.
- Levitating 7mo ago
  > Like it or not, the business world runs on Office. Maybe if EU requires local governments to use LibreOffice (or other OSS alternatives like MijnBureau) companies will follow. https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/who-uses-libreoffice/ https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/who-uses-libreoffice/ https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/ https://minbzk.github.io/mijn-bureau/
IshKebab 7mo ago
I don't know if it is. Most businesses seem to use the web-based Office365 interface now, rather than native Office. I expect the biggest reasons businesses use Windows these days are momentum, and lower support costs (Linux is still less reliably than Windows on real laptop hardware).
- mft_ 7mo ago
  I work in an area where large heavy collaborative Word documents are very commonplace. I've tried very much to make this work on Linux with the web apps, but they're just not good enough - not feature complete, and quite slow and clunky compared to the native equivalent.
7mo ago

mifydev 7mo ago

Hm, speculating a bit, but it feels like NTSYNC is essentially a beginning of NT Subsystem for Linux, or maybe ntoskrnl as a kernel module. Feels like the most clean and fast way to port Windows, since the rest of the interfaces are in the user space in real Windows. Essentially should be almost without overhead: user: [gdi32.dll,user32.dll,kernel32.dll -> ntdll.dll] -> kernel: [ntoskrnl.ko]

gigel82 7mo ago

Support for Xbox Game Pass games (typically deployed as UWP / containerized) would be absolutely amazing and likely the final nail in the coffin for Windows for gaming for many people.

sourcegrift 7mo ago

I'd rather they focus on productivity apps than games. Linux has enough toxic users as it is. I'll praise wine when I can install 12yo office 2014

3842056935870 7mo ago
[dead]

igravious 7mo ago

“And because Proton, SteamOS, and every downstream project builds on top of Wine, those gains trickle down to everyone.” the gains would trickle up, no?

igravious 7mo ago

Here's a link to try it https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/download https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/download

SeriousM 7mo ago
Flagged as advertisement
- SXX 7mo ago
  What advertisement? Codeweavers is literally the company behind Wine. Without them project would never reach point where it is now. Codeweavers developers historically been authors of 2/3 (and likely even more in past) commits in Wine.
- igravious 7mo ago
  Uh? CodeWeavers : Wine :: IBM/RedHat : Fedora

tuananh 7mo ago

I know that Wine devs are doing most of the hard works but also Valve team for doing the last mile: pushing for better UX, faster patches, pushing adoption (with their Deck device), etc...

pojzon 7mo ago

For someone gaming on linux, is proton or wine currently ahead on the virtualization side? Can we finally ditch windows ?

Nican 7mo ago

I am trying to read this article on my phone without an ad blocker, and it is an impossible challenge. Ads keeps loading and unloading, causing the page to jump around, and lose track of what I was reading. The article is really interesting, but I am actively getting frustrated with my phone.

BatteryMountain 7mo ago

Steam devs if you are reading this: add a checkbox on your checkout screen that will allow me to donate 10% or a flat amount with each purchase, that will go directly to your upstream opensource dependencies like Wine & friends. I would add money to each purchase without blinking to support these people and I think the correct place for this is at the steam checkout screen, in the case for gamers.

hnarn 7mo ago
This is a nice idea, but how do you follow through in practice? Who decides what counts as an "upstream dependency", where do you draw the line? Is the Linux kernel included? Are desktop environments included? How do you decide how much of the pot goes to each project, does curl get an equal amount to Wine? Why/why not? As I said, it's a nice idea but I have a feeling the complexity behind making this work well is what might have kept them from doing it.
- BatteryMountain 7mo ago
  So the steam devs can most likely produce a finite list of all their dependencies. They can then take a day or two to score each one with a weight. Then they use the weights to determine how to split the funds. Or they can have an open source champion person internally that takes care of relationships with opensource projects and can release funds to them as needed. Point is, lets say they accumulate $1M/year this way, it is that person's responsibility to distribute it fully back out to the community. Obviously try to keep it super simple & transparent. They can even ask game developers each quarter who they should think need money or which problems were solved well for them this round, as an extra layer of input.
  - SomeUserName432 7mo ago
    And how would you determine that the buyer intends to play on linux, and not windows like 9x% of the buyers?
    - 7mo ago

Prunkton 7mo ago

so apparently it is Proton GE 10.9 from July'25 adding ntsync support [0]. I'm playing on wine now for several years now, my deepest respect for the developers involved. Thank you! [0]: https://www.linuxcompatible.org/story/geproton109-released/ https://www.linuxcompatible.org/story/geproton109-released/

dmos62 7mo ago

I wish competitive shooters (or rather their anti-cheats) would run on Linux. Only reason left to use Windows.

angelfangs 7mo ago

Running most of my VSTs with wine + yabridge. Amazing that transcription layer/emulation software end up having less issues than running shit native.

alfanick 7mo ago

I would happily pay even a subscription to Wine, if they manage to get Lightroom running smoothly. So far I need to run VM or use a Mac just to do that.

eb0la 7mo ago
I would pay if I can use Clip Studio Paint without lag. In fact, I will try another time this easter. If works, I will need to donate.
beAbU 7mo ago
Codeweavers.com They'll take your money, and you'll be contributing to wine. It looks like they do commercial wine projects. Might cost more than a coffee a day tho!
- alfanick 7mo ago
  CrossOver support of Lightroom is just as bad a wine... Realistically it will take $20-50k of dev work to make it work (and some other apps as a side effect).

neonstatic 7mo ago

> Wine 11 is different. This isn't just another yearly release with a few hundred bug fixes and some compatibility tweaks. It represents a huge number of changes and bug fixes. What's the point of being a "journalist", when your job is to write words and instead a machine has written them? What is the point of such a "journalist"? P.S. I am assuming "Lead Technical Editor" falls under the umbrella of "journalist" in some sense

AdamConwayIE 7mo ago
Hey, article author here! I've been writing for nearly a decade, and I can assure you, all of this is human written. I've long been writing about the Linux kernel where it's been relevant to my coverage, and there are articles under my name talking about low-level technical aspects in drivers and kernels from as far back as 2017. I get that it's hard to know what to trust out there given that Dead Internet Theory is beginning to feel like a reality, but comments like this can be quite upsetting after spending days researching and writing an article like this. I totally get criticism of the article itself, and I'm fine with that, but it feels as if people are too quick to jump on the "must be written by AI" bandwagon. I receive it, my colleagues receive it, and for the people who I know put in so much effort into their work, it can be upsetting to them as well. As was mentioned in another thread, there were actually a couple of typos in this article when it went live. I cleaned those up once they were pointed out, but AI doesn't make typos. I get it to an extent; hostility and accusations of all kinds have been levied at writers for the years and years I've been in this industry writing long-form content and analysis. But with the proliferation of AI, that hostility has really ramped up over the last couple of years.
- neonstatic 7mo ago
  Apologies if my post hurt your feelings and I appreciate you taking the time to respond. The writing style in the piece I quoted looked very AI driven to me, that's why I said what I said.

paxrel_ai 7mo ago

[dead]

razkaplan 7mo ago

[flagged]

noisy_boy 7mo ago

If someone is interested in hearing the author Elizabeth Figura's views on Wine and Proton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNBKTolL5oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNBKTolL5oQ

jackhalford 7mo ago

I wonder if having a /dev/ntsync device could make it easier for game devs to compile their games for linux in the first place, instead of having to use wine. There may be other windows specific dependencies though, but this is one less right?

Innoraai 7mo ago

[dead]

brutal_chaos_ 7mo ago

BattleEye kernel module in 3 2...

MagicMoonlight 7mo ago

If we could get Proton for Mac now, it would be amazing.

devwastaken 7mo ago

Wine removed 32-bit support, breaking 90% of programs people used it for.

hu3 7mo ago
source? they actually just added 16bit support. Something not even Windows support anymore.

rkagerer 7mo ago

This is awesome news. One application I'd love to see run in Linux is Solidworks. Is there any interest in this, what would be the most effective way to support it financially, and how big a donation do you think it would take to achieve extremely good results? (Or will it forever be stuck in VM's using passthrough GPU's?)

asdaqopqkq 7mo ago

If someone can get the last decent ver. of Excel and Word running on Wine, that would be awesome

vegetable 7mo ago

I predict a massive uptick in linux switchover as soon as installation and activation of some newer ms-office versions (2019, 2021 or 2024) become possible. I think 2019 was the first that shipped with a full fledged power query. In my experience, as of now the one that works best and seamlessly is the 20 year old office 2007.