Wine has a lot of tests that are run across platforms to check conformance -- https://test.winehq.org/data/. These are a large part of why it has good compatibility.

With 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.

> 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-G...

Yep. 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.

To 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.

ReactOS also deserves an honorary mention. A lot of knowledge from that project feeds into Wine.

And vice-versa. It's pretty interesting that the two projects haven't kind of merged despite all the collaboration.

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.

ReactOS periodically rebases some of it's libraries from Wine.

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-Guide...

Surprised 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.

I simply wouldn’t have the patience to do what Elizabeth did, for a month, much less years. Really really impressive

Yes, Wine is truly a miracle. Once full support for Office is achieved, we should expect huge uptick in Linux adoption.

> full support for office

does microsoft still sell office?

Yes, Microsoft does still sell MS Office 2024 as a one time purchase:

- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

Outlook 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.

I’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).

The default mail app on Windows is now called Outlook for Windows, no relation to the Outlook in Office (sorry, Microsoft 365 Copilot), and it's a significantly worse barely functional webview. It also replaced the entire Calendar app, which was decent.

Will be removed from the next release. Then you can’t connect to your own exchange server anymore and are forced into 365 when you want a desktop app.

They've really shifted how Outlook works... as well as how the backend is more tuned to the way M365 mail works far more than how it used to work with Exchange, or independently. It's been a slow downslide imo since around 2007 or so.

I know the why, but it's really worse as an experience for most people than the older integrations... but the use of horizontally scalable backends makes for a saner platform at the expense of better UX.

Yes the do have an one time purchase option. You get 5 years of updates but no new features. I have it on my home computers. But new features are not a big deal since the differences are not big anymore (just like mobile phones.)

I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to suddenly add "features" that break said support.

"Office ain't done 'til Wine won't run"?

Ny that time office will be cloud only.

It 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.

> 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.

So that's what's keeping Microsoft from just running WINE on an MS-flavored Linux or perhaps a clean slate kernel as their next OS. I've been wondering for a while, this is by far the best explanation.

The Windows Kernel (and arguably the Windows APIs) are the only good part of Windows; they should dump everything else and run Linux above it; wait they did do that and then changed it to a boring VM.

if you rip out linux from your linux distribution you usually end up with GNU.

So, that would make this GNU/Windows

They could brand it as “New Windows”

Out with the old, in with the GNU.

I was disappointed when Microsoft dropped original WSL.

I'll admit I wasn't a Windows user at the time, nor since for that matter. But I had been before.

I knew the history of the "Windows Services for UNIX" and thought that it was incredibly interesting to have the Windows kernel, full driver support, NTFS, and the ability to just use Windows normally, but also be able to just do UNIX-type stuff more or less normally.

Which is what I've been doing on my Mac since the early 2000s.

Then Microsoft had to make Windows a complete shit-show. Not like it hasn't happened before, but they really got themselves in deep this time.

> "running WINE on an MS-flavored Linux"

Like obsolete Longene project?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longene

Parts of the OS were designed for Office. (Windows installer service, for example)

Office used to work well on WINE. It was the switch to a rolling release model that killed it.

> Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output.

They should be trivial to port then, no?

Yes, they are easy to port a lot of the time. Especially now because you can use DXVK to translate DirectX calls into Vulkan, so you don't need to write a Vulkan renderer. Input is sometimes a trickier one to deal with but a lot of the time games are using cross-platform libraries for that already!

Despite all this the Unity engine has spotty Linux support. Some games run better under Wine vs. Unity's native Linux builds. It's Vulkan renderer has had a memory leak for a while now. Input has randomly decided to double keypresses on some distros.

The hard part of Linux ports isn't the first 90% (Using the Linux APIs). It's the second 90%.

Platform bugs, build issues, distro differences, implicitly relying on behavior of Windows. It's not just "use Linux API", there's a lot of effort to ship properly. Lots of effort for a tiny user base. There's more users now, but proton is probably a better target than native Linux for games.

It’s not really about OS differences - as the GP said, games don’t typically use a lot of OS features.

What they do tend to really put a strain on is GPU drivers. Many games and engines have workarounds and optimizations for specific vendors, and even driver versions.

If the GPU driver on Linux differs in behavior from the Windows version (and it is very, very difficult to port a driver in a way that doesn’t), those workarounds can become sources of bugs.

The killer for games tends to be the anti-cheat or anti-piracy layers.

I have a Windows game I can't run under CrossOver (aka Wine 11) or a VM, only because its anti-piracy layer doesn't accept those circumstances.

Meanwhile I had to pirate Dark Souls 1 because Microsoft's own DRM prevented the legitimately purchased game from saving on Windows, and download official no-cd patches for two other games because their DRM stopped working.

The problem with DRM is the DRM.

Yeah but Windows is a more stable api to develop against than Linux (at least when it comes to stuff that games need to do) - it doesn't feel "pure", but pragmatically it's much better as a game developer to just make sure the Windows version works with proton than it is to develop a native linux version that's liable to break the second you stop maintaining it.

As someone once said it best, Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

Because free software doesn't need such a thing as a stable ABI.

There does exist flatpak, everything that would benefit from a stable ABI could use that.

You'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.

You mean dos games, just run them under a dos emulator then.

Oh, no, before everything kind of converged to OpenGL and DirectX, there were oodles of different things trying to be the next graphics API.

There are the more obvious ones like 3DFX/Glide, but there was also stuff like the Diamond Edge 3D, which used Sega Saturn style "quads".

NO, I meant Windows games.

90s Windows ran inside of DOS, and you can run e.g. Windows 98 games (through Windows itself) in DOSBox. Look up exowin9x where they're trying to compile all of the necessary configs for one-click launchers.

I didn't think that regular DOSBox had support for stuff like 3dFX does it? Or other weird APIs?

I had to use PCem to get support for that stuff.

I've had some success with installing windows in dosbox-x which has glide support. Faster and more lightweight than pcem/86box

I tried running the elder scrolls Redguard, on wine, which launches windows version of dosbox with glide support. Redguard is a weird beast which is installed only with windows installer, but the actual game runs in dos mode

Everything works but the frame rate isn't great

If anyone knows a good Redguard setup for Linux please mail me, you can guess my mail easily. Now I just run the gog version

Then you can use dosbox-x which can run any non nt windows version and has support for 3d acceleration

Again, I meant windows games, not DOS games.

Windows before NT is just a dos app, and dosbox(-x) can play all windows games up to those which require ME.

That is really not true.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...

Yeah, people forget that MS Office, and Excel and Outlook in particular, are the real foundation of Microsoft's vendor lock-in on the desktop.

Outlook is now basically an Electron app, they've deprecated the old desktop Outlook in favor of a port of the web app to desktop, so it's basically just Excel remaining.

Electron apps also basically don’t work in Wine. I miss having Evernote on Linux.

Wouldnt it be possible to extract the files you need and sort of "repackage" it for linux?

I have no idea how electron apps look "internally" but it doesnt sound too bad.

Sort of like you can unzip .deb files and use them somewhere else, if what i heard was correct (never tried it myself)

Not my area of expertise so I could be wrong but Electron apps just use Chromium underneath (which already works on linux), so in theory it should be easier to get them running on linux than a native Windows app

If the Electron app is pure JS with no native extensions it can be doable. However, many Electron apps contain platform-specific js code, since features for stuff like Dock on Mac and Taskbar icons on Windows differ. Electron apps like Notion also contain native extensions - compiled C/C++/Objective-C code that are platform specific. For example in Notion, we use sqlite via better-sqlite3 (potentially replaceable since it’s open source, but will need more work than “just” repackaging js), but we also write our own native support libraries to use OS-specific APIs for microphone recording in meeting notes feature.

I have seen many people porting such apps, like there is aur package for notion, figma

It's cool that arch users give porting Notion a valiant effort. But as I predicted, custom native extensions will be [a problem](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/notion-app-electron#comme...):

> Could it be possible to make the relatively new AI meeting notes feature to work?

> Right now I get the following error when I click the "start transcribing" button:

    Error occurred in handler for 'notion:get-media-access-status': TypeError: s.systemPreferences.getMediaAccessStatus is not a function
        at /usr/lib/notion-app/app.asar/.webpack/main/index.js:2:631015
        at WebContents.<anonymous> (node:electron/js2c/browser_init:2:87444)
        at WebContents.emit (node:events:524:28)

Thank you for the thorough reply :)

I really like the comments on HN, they are very often really interesting and you actually often learn something new that actually matters.

How is that even possible? I expect you have to go out of your way to make it platform dependent, are you sure?

Electron is basically just a GUI framework. The application itself can be arbitrarily complicated, nothing stops you from building a Java + .NET + C++&COM app that includes three Windows Services that interfaces with the Electron runtime just for UI.

> Outlook is now basically an Electron app

And it's horrible.

Yeah, that's because Microsoft can see the writing on the wall. They don't want Windows to die, but they know the whole OS is at a point where it's probably inevitable that it will.

Developers don't want to use Windows anymore. They all want to run Linux because servers do. Ballmer was right about one thing: It was about the developers.

Microsoft can't compete with Chrome at the K-12 level. A Chromebook is a fraction of the cost at twice the runtime, so nobody is going to learn Windows growing up. There won't be a generation of new ready-trained Microsoft consumers every year.

And the average consumer? Oh, they're running an iPhone and maybe an iPad that's it. If Apple were really smart they'd have released an iPhone screencast dock, but Apple still thinks the iPhone doesn't need multiple user profiles. However, even with Apple's stupid behavior, they're losing their core consumer audience.

Steam is tired of Microsoft, too, so they're pushing for compatibility. Video games are either cross platform, console exclusive, or easy enough to emulate. If nVidia's graphics drivers weren't so proprietary, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult.

The big holdouts are the same people that kept COBOL a live programming language in the 21st century: The business office folks.

Microsoft has missed the boat on smartphones, tablets, budget laptops, smart TVs, video game consoles (which is a little surprising), server-side infrastructure, development, and now AI. Their market prospects right now are Millenials and older that don't want change, people who need exactly Excel or Outlook, and PC video gamers that aren't interested in change. Their best product is VS Code and it's free, their second best product (SQL Server) is pricing people out, and their third best product (.Net) is also free.

At this point I think they're mainly hoping Adobe doesn't jump ship.

> Developers don't want to use Windows anymore.

I mean, did they ever?

I've been programming just since ~2010, but I've only ever saw majority prefer macs due to hardware (with exception being late intel macs) and linux on the regular PCs.

With exception of game devs, I've not seen person who _happily_ defaults to windows, not due to fact that they have to because of company policy or because company is too cheap for an Apple device.

Yes, developers used to like Microsoft. That was where all the money was, and Visual Studio was an extremely good IDE in the late 90s and early 2000s. And at the time, Microsoft's documentation was the best. C++, VB, and then .Net development combined with Sql Server (then a budget option) was a very enticing stack. Using ASP instead of Perl or ColdFusion or PHP was also attractive.

At the time Mac was still largely dominated by PowerPC and Classic OS. And Linux was still seen as an OS for hobbyists and universities. It was not taken seriously until well into the 00s and the 2.4 kernel. Sun was struggling with Java, and the unices were well into their decline from the 80s.

I would say that the transition was how much better Apache was than IIS when it came to operational and security issues.

Having worked in non-swe enterprise for two decades I would argue that this is less true today than it was 10 years ago. It used to be that new hires would come with a basic knowledge of windows and office, but that's no longer the case. At the same time, you have things like Smartsheets and so on, which are more popular, at least with our employees, than Excel and everyone seems to hate Outlook these days. I don't think it was ever really the case though. What Microsoft sells to enterprise is governance, and they really don't have any competition in this area.

Being in the European energy sector we're naturally looking into how we can replace every US tech product with an EU/FOSS one. It's actually relatively easy to buy the 365 experience through consultants which will setup a NextCloud, Libre/Only Office, Proton and a teams replacement I can't for the life of me remember the name of. Beneath it there is a mix of Identity Management systems, often based around Keycloak, at least for now. It works, from what we've seen in Germany (specificlaly with their military) it's also possible to roll it out relatively quickly. It's all the "other" stuff that gets murky. There isn't a real alternative to AD/Entra, yet, from a governance perspective. There are great tech solutions which does the same thing, but they require a lot of IT man hours. Something the public sector is always going to be more willing to deal with than the private sector. If we collectively decided that trains in Denmark should be free for passengers, then that would happen. You can't do that in a private business, though security obviously does factor into it.

This is the general story really. Microsoft's copilot studio is relatively new, and it's probably been flying under the radar in a lot of tech circles because it's basically what power automate always wished it could be. Having used it to build a HR flow, where an AI model will receive the applications, read them, auto-reply to irrelevant ones, create a teams site with files and the relevant people for the relevant applications, and invite the applicant to their first appointment. Well... I gotta say that I'm not sure what we have that's an alternative to that. It took me a couple of hours to build it, and it frankly works better than I thought it would. Granted, I did know the tool because I had previously done a PoC where I build a teams agent which "took over" my teams interactions. Everyone noticed because it spelled correctly and wasn't capable of posting Warhammer 40k ORK meme's in any form of quality, but it was frightenly easy. What Microsoft sells in this area is again the governance of it all. You can do these things because of how EntraID lets you connect services seamlessly with a few clicks. While behind the scenes all of those clicks are only available to you because your IT department control them... Again... without hundreds of manhours.

I'm sure we'll eventually get there, but it'll likely come down to change management. Because even if you're willing to retrain your IT operations crew, it's not likely that they will want to leave the Microsoft world where they are well paid and job-secure. Well, maybe I'm in a cheese bell, but I've never met an Azure/Microsoft IT person who would want to work with something else, and having been forced to work a little bit with it behind the scenes, I sort of get it... well not really.

Which boils down to why Microsoft has always been good with enterprise customers. The decision makers in your organisation will listen to everything, but their own IT departments will often sort of automatically recommend Microsoft products and at the end of the day, it'll all boil down to risk. Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff? (this isn't an actual question I'm asking, it's what goes through the considerations.)

> ...an AI model will receive the applications, read them, auto-reply to irrelevant ones...

You're probably breaking EU law by building this nightmare.

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/86/

All that law says is that the applicant 'shall have the right to obtain from the deployer clear and meaningful explanations of the role of the AI system in the decision-making procedure and the main elements of the decision taken.'

And even then, only if a job application rejection 'produces legal effects or similarly significantly affects that person in a way that they consider to have an adverse impact on their health, safety or fundamental rights'.

So as long as the company is recording the decisions taken and the reasons for those decisions, and providing those to candidates on request, they're in the clear.

I doubt that they are, but maybe!

If they're using a LLM to make those decisions, then they're fundamentally unable to provide the reasons for those decisions, because of how LLMs work.

Not to mention you can't trust that the AI is actually filtering out applications properly. I've run into that myself when I was responsible for hiring at my last role. The AI solution my boss insisted we use was awful. It highly rated completely unqualified applicants and ignored the few good ones.

This probably reflects my own prejudices, but it always struck me that MS based IT people wouldn’t work with anything else, basically because they couldn’t.

That stack optimises for not really having to understand what you’re doing, but also avoiding any major foot guns (and having the general arse covering that buying IBM used to provide, but which MS now does). The price you pay is that everything is horrible to work with. But if the alternative is not really being able to get anything done at all then so be it?

The Windows ecosystem does a lot of things that, to me, as a Linux/MacOS user, seem like a weird bunch of crazy decisions that are different just because.

Whether that's true or not, it does mean that a lot of people who came up on Windows IT don't have a mental framework for how to run or manage Linux systems. Likewise, when I'm trying to diagnose something on Windows it just seems like the entire thing is a disaster; where are event logs? In the event viewer! How do I filter them? It's a mess! Can I search them? Kind of! Do they have information to help me diagnose the problem? Almost never!

On Linux, I know all the tools I need to solve all the problems that come up; on Windows, I have only minimal concept of how things work, and very little way to diagnose or debug them when they go wrong, which is often.

For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds, but I'm a Linux IT dork and I have no clue.

> For example, when my Windows gaming machine comes out of hibernation my ethernet controller insists that there's no connection. I can't convince it otherwise except by disabling the device and re-enabling it. I can't figure out where I might find information that tells me why this is happening, so I just wrote a powershell script to turn it off and then on again. I bet some Windows IT dork could figure it out in 30 seconds

Windows and Linux dork here (heh). It has to do with how various computer manufacturers implemented the Sleep/Standby State (S3/S4), how they've resisted implementing a common standard at the hardware level, and how Microsoft eventually gave up arguing and patched around it with their own Modern Standby system in the S0 state.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).

> Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).

This has always been my experience, going back I'd say at least to the early 2000s on cheap laptops, and all the way back to the earliest days of sleep and hibernate on desktops, where sleep just doesn't matter that much.

When I started dabbling in boot code around 2006, I read a bunch of the specs and one of them was ACPI, which I only scratched the surface of.

I think until then it had just not occurred to me that a modern paged protected OS would even want to call into any code supplied with the computer, vs. having it come from a driver disk, or be built in to the kernel where everyone can see it.

The whole idea of a bytecode interpreter running random code supplied by a fly-by-night system builder is a little unsettling.

> Which is what Microsoft really sells... risk-mitigation. Sure their licenses are expensive, but is it really more expensive than losing your entire IT staff?

There's an old saying in IT that was pretty popular in the 70s and 80s: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

You'll notice that nobody says it anymore.

For games, part of that mere „output” is 3d graphics, so replicating the internals of Direct 3D exactly right and getting the Linux GPU drivers to cooperate. That’s a hardcore task.

Fun fact: MS Office also uses Direct3D :) See "Graphics" requirement here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/system-requiremen... We put a ton of effort into D3D11 specifically to get MS Office running.

Steam and CodeWeavers contribute a lot of code to the Wine project, because it underpins their business models of supporting Windows games on non-Windows platforms.

Between them they make up the vast bulk of what actually gets attention and improvement in Wine, and neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.

> neither one has any interest in supporting non-game applications.

I don't know how much of their business it is today, but CodeWeavers spent their first decade or so supporting only non-game applications. Their product Crossover was originally Crossover Office because it was optimized around productivity applications.

Also a big part of the marketing for the SteamMachine/SteamDeck/SteamFrame is that it has a desktop mode and can be used like a pc, so i think they also have an interest in that

i didn’t buy a steam deck since so i can run Microsoft Office. i like that there’s freedom to open up desktop mode to tinker / install 3rd party software, but not to use it as a business machine.

I just talked about using it on Desktop mode like a PC. I never said anything about doing business on it or using it as your Work PC.

Even the announcement "trailer" of the steammachine showed it getting used on a Computer monitor with mouse and keyboard in desktop mode. They even said they want to improve the "Desktop mode only" experience iirc and for there more apps than just games are important.

And i personally probably wouldnt have bought a steamdeck if it wasnt possible to just go into desktop mode and do whatever.

I don't know that they are. It's just there's more incentive to port stuff that has no direct alternative.

I find it difficult to believe that someone with enough technical knowledge to run a Linux desktop for business purposes in 2026 would be reliant on the MS Office suite. Other people have given plenty of technical reasons for the difficulty. I don't think it’s a useful goal to get them running when practical alternatives like libreoffice exist.

Libreoffice isn’t a practical alternative if your are an Excel or Word power user.

these apps are all like web browsers, and likely needlessly complicated due to patching the same codebase for so long. its MS afterall. there will be code in there that they themselves hardly understand.

Although running Microsoft web apps are getting better.

Games really only usually rely on standardized libraries and APIs, whereas application software relies on system libraries to do things like paint their UI.

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.)

Valve'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.

I 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.

Idk, kernel anti cheat is a pretty clear sign to me that I should pick a different game to play anyway...

Ironically 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.

you may be on to something here. "you want to play our game, boot it off a usb drive"

Does 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.

I 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.

Wine 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.

I 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?

Good question and one I am now looking into

Paying for a game that inserts rootkits into your kernel feels like paying money to get molested. no thanks.

Hate 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.

agreed. 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.

I 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.

Because anti cheat on linux is completely useless.

By and large Im happy to not participate in games that use kernel level anti-cheat.

Now 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!

Requires 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.

for 99% of people it will also probably be paypal or credit card

> Donate to the Wine Development Fund by cash, cheque, or international money order in US dollars.

IMHO 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.

The best low overhead way to support them for Americans is to set up bill pay with their bank and auto send checks to their mailbox

Can you have a Steam Wallet without having a credit card?

Yes, I do. It just means that you have to manually "recharge" your Steam wallet when it runs low. That's some effort, but it limits the possible damage if something goes wrong.

How do you "recharge" you Steam Wallet? Gift cards, I assume?

Yep, depending on where you live you can probably find them wherever you find other major brand gift cards.

Paysafe cards. A store near me has them.

i pay for crossover license (wine on mac), if i understand correctly, they spend this money on development wine core as well.

This is a fantastic idea. I completely endorse it. I hope a Valve employee sees this.

You always give 30% to Valve and their interests so far are aligned. Everything that's possible within the Steam ecosystem is available outside of it. Maybe things will change in the future, but I doubt we could be getting a better deal.

Great idea!

Such donations might even be tax-deductible revenue for Valve, so even the finance bros should love it.

Although I would prefer if Valve simply commits to a fixed percentage of its Steam fee to be donated...

Forwarded donations are not tax-deductible (in the US); That's a lie that's been spread around the internet. If you give a company money with the express purpose of them forwarding it to someone else (the company acts as a "collection agent"), it's not their income or donation.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-gets-tax-benefit-thos...

And even if it was, all "tax deductible" would mean is that they wouldn't have to pay taxes on that money. Which, you know, they don't get to spend. So it's kind of defacto tax deductible in the same sense that my friend's income is "tax deductible" for me, I guess.

A lot of people online have convinced themselves that "tax deductible" means that the government would refund you that dollar amount. That's a "tax credit"... If forwarded donations were a tax credit, then yes, rounding up is giving the company "free" money! But you're not.

Interesting, thanks for the details.

So it would be actually financially _better_ for Valve to donate a portion of their revenue and state "we will donate x% of the price to yy", as THEN it would be tax-deductible for them

It's not better, because being revenue and donated away and tax-deductible all cancels out. It's as if they never saw the money, just like forwarding it.

Buy a steam deck. It sends a strong signal to Valve to continue supporting Wine and you get a Steam Deck

I'm in Africa, when I go to the steam deck page, it says it is not available in my country. Not interested in buying from a third party importer. So until then..

What about buying from a fellow Hacker News nerd? I'm willing to handle shipping a new unit for you, based in USA. :-)

I also have a used 1st-gen model, upgraded with hall-effect joysticks and a 2TB SSD with a glass screen protector that I am willing to part with. Apart from a few barely-visible scuffs on the plastic housing, it's in great condition. If you're interested, let me know how to get in touch!

Unfortunately Steam decks have been out of stock for a while. The AI slop Apocalypse ruined the consumer computing market with chip shortages.

it's was out of stock as soon as they came out and in a lot of countries outside of the US it wasn't available.

I wanted to buy the entire new lineup (Machine, VR, and controller), but alas, AI RAM shortage. I hope it can get released soon.

> if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies

Or how about instead of passing the cost off to users, Steam actually supports them from their own profits? After all, they are profiting from free work.

We can't be pushovers about this.

As far as I can tell, Valve makes significant contributions back to Wine via Proton development. Isn't that essentially them supporting their upstream dependencies with their own profits, by using some of those profits to pay people to contribute work to their open source dependencies?

No.

Valve pays over a hundred open source developers to work on the various open source projects that they rely on so heavily, so yeah Valve's 30% of your Steam purchases is already contributing to these open-source projects (like Mesa, the Linux kernel, Wayland, etc.)

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-is-paying-a-whole-lot-of-devel...

Value does pay for development on open source projects already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34061110

> 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!

It'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.

Space Marine 2 works, at least on steam deck

Yea 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.

To 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

The 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?

I 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.

Red Box: https://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/

I 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.

Games 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.

I used WINE a lot in the 2000s, mostly for gaming. It was often pretty usable, but you often needed some hacky patches not suitable for inclusion in mainline. I played back then with Cedega and later CrossOver Games, but the games I played the most also had Mac ports so they had working OpenGL renderers.

My first memorable foray into Linux packaging was creating proper Ubuntu packages for builds of WINE that carried compatibility and performance patches for running Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.

Nowadays Proton is the distribution that includes such hacks where necessary, and there are lots of good options for managing per-game WINEPREFIXes including Wine itself. A lot of the UX around it has improved, and DirectX support has gotten really, really good.

But for me at least, WINE was genuinely useful as well as technically impressive even back then.

Also these apps changed, A lot of windows programs were simple executables and I remenber for a moment it was very popular for developers to write portable apps that were just a .exe that you ran,also excel and other programs worked fine, but then microsoft and others started to use msxis or whatever it's called and more complex executable files and it was not longer posible, and microsoft and adobe switched to a subscription based system.

It took some futzing. The crusty PlayOnLinux UI is permanently etched into my brain.

Transgaming! It worked for ons or two games for me, bit it was glorious.

I 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.

You 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.

Windows itself is a bunch of hacks, too, so if you think Wine is the same, then it surely looks like a very accurate emulation.

I think very few software can be considered _not_ a bunch of hacks, especially in the age of vibe coded electron apps.

You're saying the opposite of what the person you think you're agreeing with is.

I look forward to your conversion 20 years from now.

With 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.

It 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.

Meanwhile 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.

I 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.

The first time I seriously used wine it was to run Forscan (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.

It'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.

You're saying that Windows' system interfaces aren't stable? In comparison to Linux?

The API underneath the Win32 API, the Windows Native API, is not necessarily stable and therefore not intended for direct consumption by applications.

If 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.

I 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.

win32 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.

I'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.

Wine configuration -> Drives -> Remove

It's like the most trivial thing to change

It's impossible to know this behavior on first installation. I prefer opt-in fior sharing my disks to wine.

Way 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.

With AI, you can automate all the grunt work.

AI 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.

Well about clean room, you almost got a haircut due to Google v. Oracle in the Android-Java API dispute

I guess the silver lining is that the Windows ABI is extremely stable

It’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.

There 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.

Those aren’t the ones I am talking about. The global economy runs on Excel.

The EU seems to rapidly be adopting ODF, at least in official guidelines.

That's not boring at all. A lot of the works done in Wine can be fed back to ReactOS

There was a time when WINE was iffy. At best.

It’s gotten good and reliable.

Commendations to contributors!

I 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.

I 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!