They're very amazing, it feels truly magical, but in my experience, they're very fragile. Back in ~2014/2015 I was able to play Skyrim on my trash cheap laptop in Archlinux (don't remember the settings and fps, but the game ran "flawlessly" for me, yet I need to admit I'm not a gamer so I can't tell the difference between 30fps 60 fps etc).

I tried the same in 2018 just for fun and I wasn't able to run Skyrim, there was always some minor issues that made the game unplayable, like mouse not working, crashing on certain screens etc. I essentially kept trying older versions of Wine, and eventually found some version that made Skyrim playable (still not as flawless as it felt in 2015, but playable). Idk if it was my mistake, or some archlinux lib weirdness or something else, but I had to try dozens of wine versions to find something that worked. This is fine for me, since I wasn't intending to play Skyrim, I was just trying to run it (for the "WOW" effect), but I imagine people who actually need Windows software might have been frustrated by this.

FWIW, I've found that using the Steam launcher eliminated any compatibility issues which may have cropped up. I'm not a linux desktop power user, and didn't need to be.

> I'm not a gamer so I can't tell the difference between 30fps 60 fps etc

It's like driving a car with a rough idle vs. a smooth idle. You can get used to driving a car with a rough idle, and not particularly care. But once you've driven both, you can identify which is which pretty easily, and the rough idle starts to bug you when you know it can be smoother.

I might make a different comparison:

Everyone who has played more than one video game knows that some just feel better than others. In one, your character is fluid and nimble, and in another, slow and clunky.

This is the result of many things, but a large portion comes from input lag and frame rate. More advanced users aren't necessarily more perceptive, they're just better at pinpointing what they're reacting to. (And in some cases, conscious of how an experience could be improved.)

This is similar to the study of any type of art. Whereas a casual observer might look at a painting and say "meh, I don't like it", someone who has studied art pedagogically can describe precisely what isn't working for them.

To add, how you play and what you play matters too. 30fps on a TV with a controller in a racing game won't feel that bad compared to 30fps in CS:GO with a mouse - where 30fps will make the game a LOT harder to play.

If you have an iPhone a quick way to see the difference between 30fps and 60fps is to open the camera app and move the phone around in Photo mode, then switch to Slo-mo and try it again. You’ll notice that slo-mo feels way smoother. On an iPad Pro with the 120Hz Liquid Retina display it’s even more noticeable.

I'd say it's the opposite, Windows gamers are more used to this. I think by now one of the biggest parts of Nvidia/ATI drivers are patches and workarounds for certain games. Add the patches to the games themselves, and you've got a very fragile landscape. I've known a lot of people who aren't upgrading certain games and drivers for fear to upset their fps rate, mod compatibility or overall stability.

Heck, there are people keeping older PCs around just for that, so you can e.g. run your Skyrim LE with Win7 and an older DirectX release etc.

"Retrogaming" is quickly approaching a very small time delta.

I guess that's the price you have to pay for performance and availability. Games shouldn't be that brittle, but any fast-paced industry is likely to run into those problems, and with high-speed internet patches and a GPU duopoly, fixing it is too easy.

If i remember correctly, if you need wine for work, you pay for Crossover, which is supported better.

Indeed, i remember that i was wondering very much, when i found that Doom3 ran noticably smoother on Linux than on Windows on the same machine. I think i was even using wine back then.

I use some CAD/CAM programs on Wine and they're sensibly faster in both rendering and general usage compared to a windows install (I have a dual boot system).

I can only complain about some minor font rendering issues and the lack of child window rendering [0] which is frequently used in programs like these.

Once child window rendering is fixed, I will actually be considering ditching windows entirely and go wine-only.

[0] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-July/148639...

I noticed this as well. Old Windows programs, like programs from XP era and earlier ran better in Wine than Windows 7 back when I was experimenting with Wine.

I wonder if that's due to the change in the way Apps are composited.

In the pre Windows Vista Era, the operating system handed control over to the App to draw itself on screen. In Vista they moved to a model, like OSX, where each App drew to a buffer and the OS composited those buffers. That's part of the reason why Vista was hot steaming garbage because they were still working that transition out.

IIRC, Borderlands 2 was running better on Wine than on Windows due to the underlying filesystem (ext4 vs ntfs).

Borderlands 2 is native Linux so there is no need to use Wine.

It would be interesting to see the difference in performance between running the native version and the emulated version.