Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux?

Re:Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux? by noirbot on Monday August 15, 2022 @02:31PM (#32473476)

As someone who's been gaming on Proton or Lutris + Raw Wine, I'm not sure I agree. I regularly update Proton or Wine without seeing major issues or regressions. It certainly happens sometimes, but I'm not sure it's any worse of a "version binding" problem than a lot of stuff in Linux is. Sure, sometimes you have to specifically use an older version, but getting "native" linux games to work on different GPU architectures or distros is a mess as well, and often involves pinning drivers or dependencies. I've had games not run on my Fedora laptop that run fine on my Ubuntu desktop, but for the most part, Wine or Proton installed things work the same across Linux installs, and often with better performance somehow.

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Re:Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux? by LtWorf on Monday August 15, 2022 @04:35PM (#32475024)

I specifically mentioned the sims3. That one is constantly broken by updates.

Also age of empires2 hd, after working fine with wine/proton for a decade, doesn't work with the latest proton for me.

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Re:Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux? by noirbot on Monday August 15, 2022 @05:19PM (#32475518)

Sure, I'm not contesting that Wine breaks things with updates. So does a lot of stuff on Linux. The amount of times I run an apt update and some config file is now obsolete or just gone is a lot more often than I'd like.

The advantage is that the Wine Ecosystem seems to realize this more than the Linux ecosystem at large, and specifically makes it easy to pin versions and never update. If it worked, why update? Or why not roll back? I'm already used to having to do that with every other part of linux gaming including my graphics drivers...

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Re:Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux? by hot_gril on Monday August 15, 2022 @05:55PM (#32475959)

> If it worked, why update?

For multiplayer games, which nowadays get updated every day or something, and old versions are incompatible.

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Re:Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux? by noirbot on Monday August 15, 2022 @08:24PM (#32477608)

I'm not asking why you'd update the game, I'm asking why you'd update Wine if your game "is constantly broken by updates".

It's one thing if the game keeps updating and then you have to hope it works on the same version of Wine or re-find which version of Wine the new version of the game works with, but presumably that's a problem that the OP isn't happening with The Sims 3.

If the game works on a specific version of Wine, why would you mess with it? Or if you are, then treat it like any major OS update and back up/be ready to roll back if it breaks something. Wine is especially good at letting you make multiple sub-environments, so it's not like your whole system has to be on the same version of Wine.

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Re:Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux? by hot_gril on Monday August 15, 2022 @09:28PM (#32478182)

You update Wine to fix game A, and it breaks game B. Or something small is broken in a game, so you try to update to fix it.

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Re:Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux? by noirbot on Monday August 15, 2022 @10:00PM (#32478394)

That's not how Wine or Proton works in my experience. As OP said, Steam and Lutris both have tooling to easily set up Wine prefixes per-game, including specifying specific versions, including custom compilations like GloriousEggroll's builds. In general, you can flip between versions comfortably and easily, often without having to do anything more than changing a value in a GUI.

I could see it being an issue if you were managing your Wine prefixes by hand, but that's like deciding to install your OS dependencies without apt or dnf and then complaining that Linux has bad packages because you chose not to use a package manager.

I literally play multiple online games in Wine/Proton on a daily basis, including Path of Exile, FF14, WoW, and Payday 2. The only one I've had major issues outside of general performance with is FF14 and that's because it integrates closely with Steam and their launcher uses a super outdated version of .NET that Wine hasn't worked out how to emulate. It's been broken for years, and is a known and documented issue with Wine.

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Re:Win32 Is the Only Stable ABI on Linux? by hot_gril on Monday August 15, 2022 @05:53PM (#32475929)

And Aoe2 HD broke with every game update in Wine. I had to keep patching in different DLLs. Gave up one day. It's worse than the original game anyway.

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