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Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

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Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#151
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#152
post #16

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…

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.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#153
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate.

Wine has constant regressions. What works fine today will completely fail next year. Which is why steam lets you pick which proton version you want to use. Which means that a .exe without the exact version of wine won't run. Plus of course there's the whole vulkan stuff. Older cards aren't well supported but it will rather crash than just run openGL normally where it would work fine.

Those issues seem othorgonal to stable ABI issue from OP, specially the OpenGL one (that is more like a hardware incompatibility issue). When apps fail to run due to Wine updates, they are considered bugs to be fixed. On the native side, apps may break becuase: 1) required library is unavailable, normally because it is too old and unsupported; 2) required library's path is different in distro A from B. None of these are considered bugs and, as such, are rarely addressed. I believe Steam Linux Runtime is an attempt at fixing this,but I'm not sure about its effectiveness. Also, you are exaggerating on the "exact Wine version". It helps to know which versions don't have a regression by knowing which specific version an app used to run on.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mechan…

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 b…

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

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#155
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No other operating system works like this. Supporting older versions of an OS or runtime with a compiler toolchain a standard expectation of developers.

Plenty of operating systems work like this. Just not highly commercial ones because proprietary software is the norm on those. From a bit of research it looks like FreeBSD for example only provides a stable ABI within minor versions and I imagine if you build something for FreeBSD 14 it won’t work on 13. Stable ABI literally only benefits software where the user doesn’t have the source. Any operating system which ass…

You can still run x86 binaries on new macbooks. They don't stop working entirely. Using wine I can even run x86 windows binaries.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#158
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#159
post #91

Reading these posts always make me feel like an imposter. People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.

Same. I feel like a plumber compared to real engineers.

Engineers feel like plumbers compared to the plumbers

Re: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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

NO, I meant Windows games.
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