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I 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. Occasion
by computomatic 6mo ago
I 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo agoIdk, kernel anti cheat is a pretty clear sign to me that I should pick a different game to play anyway...
- HWR_14 6mo 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.
- worthless-trash 6mo agoI dont think you can even load the "windows" kernel module in wine. Last time i tried with the capcom rootkit, it didnt work at all.
- colejohnson66 6mo agoWine doesn't emulate the NT kernel; Just the NT and Win32 userspace APIs. For example, Wine provides a `kernel32.dll` that maps API calls into the appropriate Linux ones. Anything kernel level is operating "below" Wine.
- HWR_14 6mo agoI read the person I was responding to saying they avoided games with root kits for moral, not technical, reasons. So I assumed they were on Windows, and AFAIK, windows just offers binary "changes" permissions which covers anything from installing in the slightly protected Program Files directory to installing a rootkit. In other words, can they even detect they are about to install a root kit?
- Melatonic 6mo agoGood question and one I am now looking into
- ZiiS 6mo agoIronically the only way I would ever consider robust anti-cheet is if the game installed a seperate bootable Linux witch didn't have the encryption keys for my main partition.
- somat 6mo agoyou may be on to something here. "you want to play our game, boot it off a usb drive"
- cultofmetatron 6mo agoPaying for a game that inserts rootkits into your kernel feels like paying money to get molested. no thanks.
- Arwill 6mo agoHate to be the one saying this, but that rootkit is there to prevent you from molesting/cheating other players. So its not an one-sided issue. It is unfortunate that the developers found no other way of fighting cheats, sure. And by all means, if a game community is so toxic that it has to be policed by extreme measures, it is perhaps indeed better to avoid playing such a game altogether.
- cultofmetatron 6mo agoagreed. if a condition of attending an event was that I had to wear a chastity belt that prevented guests from raping each other, I'd think twice about attending alltogether.
- johanvts 6mo agoI don’t care if my shooter game “community” is toxic. I don’t have any interaction with the “community” other than to try and virtually kill its members. I wish my chess app had anti-cheat, there are just some people who will cheat and any game is more fun if they can be prevented from playing.
- Hikikomori 6mo agoBecause anti cheat on linux is completely useless.
- anakaine 6mo agoBy and large Im happy to not participate in games that use kernel level anti-cheat.
- BatteryMountain 6mo agoNow if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies (like the Wine team), that would be amazing! I would add extra money on every purchase to support these people!
- hochmartinez 6mo agohttps://www.winehq.org/donate https://www.winehq.org/donate
- moring 6mo agoRequires PayPal or credit card. The suggestion was to pay with your Steam Wallet or whatever payment method already used when you buy a Proton-based game on Steam.
- red-iron-pine 6mo agofor 99% of people it will also probably be paypal or credit card
- colejohnson66 6mo ago> Donate to the Wine Development Fund by cash, cheque, or international money order in US dollars.
- moring 6mo agoIMHO this supports the original point that payment via Steam would be an upgrade: Sending cash to a postal address isn't low-effort nor low-risk. Payment by cheque is something I have never done, nor would I know how to do it. I'd have to ask at my bank -- not low effort. I don't know if I'm an outlier here but I have never heard from any of my peers who ever did such a thing. The same or even worse is true for international money orders. The whole concept of making a money transfer to a postal address is something I have never heard of. Where's the IBAN? The Wine team is right to put even PayPal before all of these.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo ago> and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat. It actually gives a far better user experience for games like Battlefield 6, because on Linux they just don't work at all. Try it for yourself - it won't even start! By contrast if you run Battlefield 6 on Windows, eventually you'll end up playing it, and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a shitty buggy mess and you'll hate it. So, notch up another score for Linux!
- duttish 6mo agoIt's reached the level where a game not working is a suprise. Space Marine 2 was the latest one for me, but Steam is great at refunds if you do it quickly enough.
- Ferret7446 6mo agoSpace Marine 2 works, at least on steam deck
- duttish 6mo agoYea it seems very variable depending on hw / config etc. And the most recent patch at the time (I think this was during summer?) broke it for a bunch of other people on desktop that had it working before. For me it crashed after the first click in the menu.
- vbezhenar 6mo ago[flagged]
- kyorochan 6mo agoYou're saying the opposite of what the person you think you're agreeing with is.
- exe34 6mo agoI look forward to your conversion 20 years from now.
- severino 6mo agoWindows itself is a bunch of hacks, too, so if you think Wine is the same, then it surely looks like a very accurate emulation.
- abustamam 6mo agoI think very few software can be considered _not_ a bunch of hacks, especially in the age of vibe coded electron apps.
- caconym_ 6mo agoYou seem to have missed this part of the comment you replied to: > This was many years ago and I freely admit today that I was wrong. Personally I stopped using Windows for gaming because it literally doesn't work anymore. I installed Windows 11 on my gaming VM and DLSS and FSR were just completely broken, didn't work at all. Couldn't figure it out. Switched to Linux (Bazzite for now) and I have no regrets; the only games that don't work are the dangerous time-wasters (live service games with invasive anti-cheat) that I have less and less time for as I age.
- aranelsurion 6mo agoI remember managing to play Crysis under Linux with Wine and I was SO impressed. Never would’ve imagined one day almost every game would be playable.
- spoiler 6mo agoTo be fair, early wine (when I first tried it) wasn't very usable, and for gaming specifically. So if you were an early enthusiast adopter, you might've just experienced their growing pains. Also, I assume some Windows version jumps didn't make things easy for Wine either lol
- xattt 6mo agoThe hype/performance mismatch was significant in the 2000s for Wine. I’m not sure if there was any actual use case aside from running obscure business software. Yes, there was “the list” but there was no context and it was hard to replicate settings. I think everyone tried running a contemporary version of Office and Photoshop, saw the installer spit out cryptic messages and just gave up. Enough time has passed with enough work done, and Wine now supports/getting to support the software we wanted all along. Also, does anyone remember the rumours that OS X was going to run Windows applications?
- Fnoord 6mo agoI ran Wine end of 90s to run CS (Half-Life), and I had not only more FPS than Windows. It was more stable as well.
- aaronbrethorst 6mo agoRed Box: https://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/ https://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/
- zadikian 6mo agoI remember it being surprisingly decent for games back then. Then a lot of games moved to Steam, which made it way harder to run them in Wine. Of course there was later Proton for that, but not on Mac.
- anon291 6mo agoGames are one of the easier things to emulate since gaming mechanics are usually entirely a compute problem (and thus not super reliant on kernel APIs / system libraries). Most games contain the logic for their entire world and their UI. The main interface is via graphics APIs, which are better standardized and described, since they are attempting to expose GPU features. I worked on many improvements to wine's Direct3d layers over a decade ago... it's shockingly "simple" to understand what's happening -- it's mostly a direct translation.
- ecshafer 6mo agoWith Proton especially, which is WINE really optimized with all of the right options and a few other things, I play literally any game on linux and never worry about support. It hasn't steered me wrong yet in the last 3 or 4 years I think.
- solid_fuel 6mo agoIt has gotten to the point where I just skip buying games that don't work under proton, and there's really very few that I've missed.
- figmert 6mo agoMeanwhile I've been impressed with Wine since I discovered it. One of the few things that was keeping me from moving to Linux was MS Office suite. I struggled to get used to OpenOffice. And wine was able to run it. Sure I had to faff around with it, but I was just so impressed. I was telling all my family, but they just didn't get it. Anyway, I later stopped using it because Google Docs and then later libreoffice was good enough. I still followed it, and I continued to be impressed by all the announcements.
- donatj 6mo agoI have been using Wine on Mac for fifteen years now since I moved to Mac for work. There's always been a couple Windows programs I just can't seem to replace fully, namely RegexBuddy, and I continue to run them in Wine to this day. Everything has gotten so much better as the years have gone on, that this is a perfectly acceptable solution.
- whalesalad 6mo agoThe first time I seriously used wine it was to run Forscan (https://forscan.org/home.html https://forscan.org/home.html) to interface with my car via OBD2 port. It quite literally just worked. Installed via the executable MSI installer, finished install, booted right up, and worked with the USB device.
- samus 6mo agoIt's an unfair fear since architecturally Wine sits at the same position as the Win32 API on Windows, which also in the end merely uses the underlying native system calls. The only difference is that Linux aims to keep its system call interface stable.
- tracker1 6mo agoYou're saying that Windows' system interfaces aren't stable? In comparison to Linux?
- ConceptJunkie 6mo agowin32 dates back to 1993. OP doesn't know Windows history. Maintaining backwards compatibility was always a huge priority for Microsoft, even if it couldn't be perfect. If a program didn't work on a newer version of Windows, there's a good chance it was doing something unsupported.
- samus 6mo agoThe API underneath the Win32 API, the Windows Native API, is not necessarily stable and therefore not intended for direct consumption by applications.
- tracker1 6mo agoIf you're utilizing undocumented APIs that aren't meant for public use, sure... but the core Win32 APIs have been pretty stable for going on 3+ decades now. You can take a lot of win32 apps from the early 90's and they'll run without modification in windows today... though, they'll probably run in Wine and likely a better chance there... but still.
- samus 6mo agoI fully agree with that. Sadly there is always the odd application out there that uses the lower level stuff and is therefore tricky to get to run on Wine. Or more recent Windows versions for that matter.