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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 than
by 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 agoReactOS also deserves an honorary mention. A lot of knowledge from that project feeds into Wine.
- pdpi 7mo agoAnd vice-versa. It's pretty interesting that the two projects haven't kind of merged despite all the collaboration.
- MisterTea 7mo agoVery 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 agoReactOS periodically rebases some of it's libraries from Wine.
- badsectoracula 7mo agoWine 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...
- DaSHacka 7mo agoSurprised no one responded to the 7th comment in that linked email thread, the author brought up a good point about making progress without using any disassembled windows binaries.
- rhdunn 7mo agoWine has a lot of tests that are run across platforms to check conformance -- https://test.winehq.org/data/ https://test.winehq.org/data/. These are a large part of why it has good compatibility.
- dingdingdang 7mo agoWith this exact point in mind: I've recently written a pretty straight forward win32 c implementation of a utility with some context dependent window interactions and a tray icon to help monitor and facility reload of config file. Is there any way I can use the Wine project to facilitate this compiling and running straight under x11/linux environment as a integrated project that doesn't require the end user to fiddle with Wine? I don't mind bundling shared code as needed. Help appreciated, I tried hard and failed at this endeavour priorly.
- RunningDroid 7mo ago> Is there any way I can use the Wine project to facilitate this compiling and running straight under x11/linux environment as a integrated project that doesn't require the end user to fiddle with Wine? I don't mind bundling shared code as needed. Help appreciated, I tried hard and failed at this endeavour priorly. I believe that's what Winelib is for: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-Guide https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G...
- dingdingdang 7mo agoYep. that's the route I tried before, no good, maybe it's just that the documentation is past it's sell by date, maybe it's lack of community use.. I'm just not seeing it. Even the article itself describes how to make an exe file... that will then work in Linux? Or is it simply a program that's easier to run on Wine? Loads of text with unclear details throughout it.
- tosti 7mo agoTo make an elf, you use gcc. To make an exe, you use mingw. The rest should be a matter of include and linker paths, but that's all I can recall right now.
- refulgentis 7mo agoI simply wouldn’t have the patience to do what Elizabeth did, for a month, much less years. Really really impressive
- anal_reactor 7mo agoYes, Wine is truly a miracle. Once full support for Office is achieved, we should expect huge uptick in Linux adoption.
- jhoechtl 7mo agoNy that time office will be cloud only.
- m463 7mo ago> full support for office does microsoft still sell office?
- ThrowawayB7 7mo agoYes, Microsoft does still sell MS Office 2024 as a one time purchase: - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-2024/cfq7ttc0pqvj https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-... - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-business-2024/cfq7ttc0pbm7 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
- tom_alexander 7mo agoOutlook is a business exclusive these days?! Outlook used to be included in the most basic version of office back when I still used microsoft office.
- dhosek 7mo agoI’ve only ever used Outlook when forced to by an employer and I find it a dreadful application to use. I would guess that most people prefer something else. I would imagine that most people tend to stick with the default email app on their computer (no idea what that is on Windows as I’ve managed to avoid having to use Windows for 7 years now).
- 1bpp 7mo ago
- RachelF 7mo agoIt is a superb project, and a hard thing to do. It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.
- coldpie 7mo ago> It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games. Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. MS Office is using every single corner of Windows: every feature in the XML libraries, tons of .NET type stuff, all the OLE and COM and typelib and compound storage features, tons of Explorer integrations, auto-updating stuff via Windows patching mechanisms... there's almost no corner of the Windows OS that MS Office doesn't use.
- joe_mamba 7mo agoYou're onto something but that's not entirely true for all games. There's plenty of vintage games, made before DirectX standardized everything into the late 90s, that don't work well under wine because back in their day, they would try to bypass windows by "hacking" their way to the hardware via unsupported APIs and hooks, to squeeze every bit of performance from the hardware, and also because every hardware vendor back then from graphics to sound shipped their own APIs.
- computomatic 7mo agoI avoided using Wine (and Linux for gaming generally) for years on the sole basis that I assumed what they were trying to do was impossible to do well. Occasionally I’d try wine for some simple game and be impressed it worked at all, but refused to admit to myself that it was something I could rely on. (This was many years ago and I freely admit today that I was wrong.)
- ACS_Solver 7mo agoValve's Proton (so Wine + DXVK + some other additions) revolutionized gaming on Linux. I play games both for fun and work, and for a solid 3+ years now, gaming on Linux has been an "it just works" experience for me, and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.
- owaislone 7mo agoI really is impressive. I wish publishers like EA and anti-cheat developers weren't so reluctant to support it. I hope Steam devices and SteamOS gain enough traction to force their hands.
- amatecha 7mo agohttps://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/03/ea-javelin-anticheat-job-listing-mentions-future-support-for-linux-and-proton/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/03/ea-javelin-anticheat-j...
- sdenton4 7mo agoIdk, kernel anti cheat is a pretty clear sign to me that I should pick a different game to play anyway...
- HWR_14 7mo agoDoes windows make it easy to tell the installer wants to install kernel anti cheat? It used to pop up the generic binary "This application wants to change files on your computer" which could be installing in the protected "Program Files" or could be modifying anything.
- Perepiska 7mo agoI've tried to use Wine in order to play Steam Windows games on Mac. Wine silently exposes all my macos drives as D:/F:/etc that was open to any game I started. Immediately removed Wine. Awful experience.
- dhosek 7mo agoWay back in the 90s when I used OS/2 and running Windows applications required running a fully copy of Windows inside OS/2,¹ I had dreamed of writing something akin to Wine for OS/2, but I lacked the knowledge to do it back then (and still do). I’ve never used it since I never use Linux in a context that it would make sense (for me, as is the case for most Linux users I suspect, Linux is strictly a headless server OS). Apparently Wine is also available for the Mac, but these days I don’t know of a single Windows app² that I would want to run. ⸻ 1. A frequent debate about the time was whether this was a wise thing to do as it reduced the motivation for developers to create OS/2-native versions of applications. The slow death of OS/2 can be interpreted as both support for those who felt that Windows-under-OS/2 was a bad idea and those who felt that OS/2 was doomed from the start in the face of the Windows monopoly. 2. Largely because I’m not a gamer—when I’ve looked at what it takes, both in terms of hardware and in learning how to do stuff in games, I’ve decided that I’m happy staying that way.
- alilikestech 7mo agoWith AI, you can automate all the grunt work.
- orbital-decay 7mo agoAI unreliability aside, Microsoft suing the hell out of them was always a concern. They do clean room reimplementation to insulate themselves from legal risks as much as possible, another incentive is not what anyone wants.
- stevefan1999 7mo agoWell about clean room, you almost got a haircut due to Google v. Oracle in the Android-Java API dispute
- Kuraj 7mo agoI guess the silver lining is that the Windows ABI is extremely stable
- sneak 7mo agoIt’s astounding how badly Microsoft had to fumble their complete and unassailable monopoly on the standard video game runtime (ie Windows) for an upstart like Valve to be able to get WINE/Proton into a place where this is now possible. The mind reels. They had the biggest moat in tech, and now small shops are easily tossing homemade ladders across the gap. AAA gaming is an industry larger than all of Hollywood, and Windows is no longer a critical component. This is incompetence on an unthinkable scale. I wonder when and how Excel’s stranglehold will eventually be cracked, and if I will live to see it. Perhaps the new agentic universe will cause someone to finally make the Pixelmator of Excel.
- jsLavaGoat 7mo agoThere are huge swaths of workplaces that run on Google Docs. If you're using features of Excel and PowerPoint that doesn't work on Docs (except maybe fonts), it might be fair to say you're the one with the incompatible doc these days. K-12 education would be one such world.
- sneak 7mo agoThose aren’t the ones I am talking about. The global economy runs on Excel.
- MSFT_Edging 7mo agoThe EU seems to rapidly be adopting ODF, at least in official guidelines.
- stevefan1999 7mo agoThat's not boring at all. A lot of the works done in Wine can be fed back to ReactOS
- pyuser583 7mo agoThere was a time when WINE was iffy. At best. It’s gotten good and reliable. Commendations to contributors!
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoI was rewriting an old game of mine using SDL2 for release on Steam—had struggled with getting a build target for Linux/Steam Deck. Man, Wine just worked and I confess I copped out and just delivered MacOS and Windows targets.
- anon291 7mo agoI spent my entire college career doing consulting for a company that worked on Wine since Wine was part of its commercial offering. The work is not boring (it's fascinating!) but completely thankless. The documentation on MSDN was (and I'm guessing still is) complete shit, and most of the APIs are undocumented. Random fixes would have knock on effects. I contributed a bit to some cases on a bug open since the 90s, and since I'm still on the list, I still get messages about it!