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How Wine works 101

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Re: How Wine works 101

#51

Post by quotemstr »

haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

> What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11).

Is it? I fail to see a justification for accepting the premise of your question.

Re: How Wine works 101

#52

Post by justsomehnguy »

monocasa wrote: post #42
pizza234 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no Windows fan, but this is not an accurate portrayal (d'oh!). Microsoft has historically put a huge amount of effort in (backwards) compatibility. Here's a famous example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-... . Related (sub) discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13450160 . It's possible that they changed strategy recently, but there is a very long history of extraordin…

'Recently' meaning about the past 10 years or so. Windows 8 broke a lot of software for me that runs in Wine.

In 2016 I was asked to install some software on a WinSvr2012R2. I was forced to install it on my Win8.1 tablet first, because the 16-bit stub didn't work on x64 2012R2. After install I copied the files to the server and the software brazenly showed "XXX for Windows 95" in the Help->About. On a 2012R2 x64 server. In the year 2016.

There was (and is) a lot of shit which developers did wrong (including writing directly to C:\WINDOWS). Yet if they did stick to the basics (GDI output and so on) that worked for decades. I abandoned Corel PhotoPaint 3 (with (c) 1992) only after moving to Vista in 2008.

Re: How Wine works 101

#53

Post by bee_rider »

quotemstr wrote: post #51
haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

> What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Is it? I fail to see a justification for accepting the premise of your question.

That's an odd failure. The justification is in the second half of the paragraph. If you think this is non-representative or that the poster is a liar, fine, but their reason for asking the question is right there.

> Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day too for work. But by my experience if I come around an old Windows application (Vista, XP, 2000 or before) then I probably have a better chance to run it as it meant to be on Linux w/ Wine than on Windows 10/11

Re: How Wine works 101

#54

Post by quickthrower2 »

kelnos wrote: post #49
quickthrower2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the joke is good here, because the title is ridiculously ambiguous, and a technical article about how wine is made would suit HN as much as one about WINE. But when people try hard to make a pun that isn't so good.

I look at it the other way: with the title worded and capitalized as it is, the joke is so obvious that I just can't find it funny at all. Immediate eye-roll and downvote from me when I clicked on the comments and saw that the top comment (at the time, at least) was a joke. Heh, I just reloaded the page, and it looks like that comment wasn't even a joke after all! The commenter did not read the article, but honestly…

Sometimes titles are all-first-caps though. It is not obvious it doesn't mean the drink. If it is first-caps for first words and proper nouns, then why has "Works" got a capital?

Edit: only in the HN submission, but still.

Re: How Wine works 101

#55

Post by bee_rider »

haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

It is apparently possible to run Wine on WSL.

https://liliputing.com/wine-on-windows-lets-you-run-windows-...

I wonder if you can run Cygwin on it.

Re: How Wine works 101

#56

Post by chungy »

Koshkin wrote: post #20
nine_k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of Wine is to run older Windows software. Who needs the most modern versions, just pays for MS Windows. Windows, like DOS before it, adapts to run certain apps more efficiently, to sidestep their bugs, or to fulfill their assumptions which generally do not hold. I suppose Wine does a lot of the same. It pays a lot of attention tp running old(er) popular software smoothly. I suppose Wine has more adjustments…

> The point of Wine is to run older Windows software. Is this really true? What “newer” Windows software would not run under Wine “in principle”? (And, for that matter, what older Windows software wouldn’t run on Windows itself?)

I imagine GP conceived Wine as such because Wine has tended to have a greater chance of running older software than brand new software. This might be because Wine hasn't had the time to catch up with the latest APIs.

But in short, no. Wine has a goal of running all Windows software, old and new.

Re: How Wine works 101

#57

Post by saghm »

Kye wrote: post #9
userbinator wrote: post #7

tl;dr: WINE can be considered to be more like an API translator. The opposite is also possible (Linux binaries on Windows), the most recent attempt being WSL from Microsoft itself, but there were a few other attempts before that: http://cowlark.com/lbw/index.html is one example I just found. ...and as an aside, the comments about the alcoholic beverage really suggest that they should've kept it named WINE (all upperc…

There's a big wine glass on the project's website. I don't get the impression the association bothers them.

I think GP just meant that it can be ambiguous which one is meant (especially in the context of headlines like this); I'd imagine that even if it were always cased WINE it would still be pretty easily associated with the drink.

Re: How Wine works 101

#58

Post by eru »

gerdesj wrote: post #17
haunter wrote: post #6

What I'm curious about (and probably there are some good write ups about this somewhere) that how come modern Linux and modern Wine is better to run old Windows applications than modern Windows (7 to some extent but mostly 10&11). Did MS "intentionally" "left behind" certain APIs and system calls to sacrifice it for some greater good? Like I use Windows every day and have no problems at all. And I use Linux every day…

MS are profit motivated (by definition) and Wine is functionality motivated (again by definition). MS are currently hell bent on getting you onto a cloud subscription for Windows as a service (WAAS) because that is their current business model. The Wine project is hell bent on delivering functionality that you want and they think you might want. Wine is less about shuffling the start menu to the middle of the taskbar…

> MS are profit motivated (by definition) and Wine is functionality motivated (again by definition).

What definitions are you using here?

Re: How Wine works 101

#59

Post by robotnikman »

emptyparadise wrote: post #46
seba_dos1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most recent attempt being WSL from Microsoft itself Worth noting that this only applies to WSL1; WSL2 works in a completely different way.

Still a bit sad that Microsoft went the hypervisor way with WSL2, rather than the Windows Subsystem way in WSL1. It makes perfect sense that they did, but I'm still a bit sad.

Same. Though the use of 9P protocol in WSL2 to access the host filesystem was interesting

Re: How Wine works 101

#60

Post by Topgamer7 »

Matl wrote: post #12
amelius wrote: post #8

Any WINE-like projects out there but for MacOS/iOS (as opposed to Windows)?

https://github.com/darlinghq/darling but it's very early.

I've been trying to follow their progress, but they haven't been updating their blog in 3 years. And they seem to just communicate using discord. So there isn't much publicly accessible visibility.
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