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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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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.

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

It’s gotten good and reliable.

Commendations to contributors!

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.

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

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

With AI, you can automate all the grunt work.

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

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.