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

Post by RunningDroid » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 12:58 AM UTC

dingdingdang wrote: post #222

rhdunn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by josh_p » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

RachelF wrote: post #119

tombert wrote: 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…

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.

Post by seba_dos1 » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 1:18 AM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #212

seba_dos1 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You compile in a container/chroot with the userspace you target. Done. In the context of games, that will likely be Steam Runtime.

it's not that simple. you want to be able to use a modern toolchain (compilers that support the latest standards) but build a binary that runs on older systems. the only way to achieve that is to get the older libraries installed on a newer system, or you could try backporting the new toolchain to the older system. but that's a lot harder.

Post by tombert » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 1:21 AM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #193

joe_mamba wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by rescbr » Wed, Mar 25, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

anthk wrote: post #112

porphyra wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine actually does run some ancient Windows games better than Windows 11 itself.

Anything Direct Draw related will be mapped into OpenGL under Unix giving you decent speeds. On Windows it will be a crawling slideshow because from Windows 8 and up it will use a really dog slow software mode with no acceleration at all, worse than plain VESA. Yes, you can reuse WineD3D DLL's on Windows and run these game in a fast way, but not by default, it's a Win32 port of some Wine libraries.