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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

#261

Post by badsectoracula »

akdev1l wrote: post #41
orbital-decay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. Games need a stable ABI and Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.

Proprietary software needs a stable ABI. Not games. DOOM runs on any Linux system since forever because we had access to the source. You can build it for Linux 2.6 and it’ll probably still work today. Sadly most games are proprietary

> Proprietary software needs a stable ABI.

Open source software also needs a stable ABI because:

a) i don't want to bother building it over and over (not everything is in my distro's repository, a ton of software has a stupid building process and not every new version is always better than the old versions)

b) a stable ABI implies a stable API and even if you have the source, it is a massive PITA to have to fix whatever stuff the program's dependencies broke to get it running, especially if you're not the developer who made it in the first place

c) as an extension to "b", a stable API also means more widely spread information/knowledge about it (people wont have to waste time learning how to do the same tasks in a slightly different way using a different API), thus much easier for people to contribute to software that use that API

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

#262

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

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.

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

#263

Post by simoncion »

senfiaj wrote: post #232
duskwuff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly runs 16-bit Windows games better than Windows 11, which can't run them at all. Not that there are a ton of those, but it's still pretty neat that they work.

16-bit software won't run natively in 64-bit mode. It requires some programmatic emulator, like DosBox. Or am I missing something?

The thing that you're missing is that Microsoft used to ship that emulator with Windows. Then they stopped doing that.

AFAICT, Wine can run WIN16 programs. I don't know if it can run DOS programs. There's a WineHQ wiki page that says it can load DOS programs, but various internet fora seem to believe that Wine's DOS support is pretty broken. I've never tried it, and have no DOS programs handy, so I can't verify those claims.

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

#264

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

mft_ wrote: post #161

This is great. Not to sound snarky, but now please get it to run Microsoft Office. I'd argue that this is the last barrier to many, many people being able to use Linux full-time for business purposes.

Entirely.

If you really / actually want Linux and Linux Gaming to really take off, contribute with whatever helps to get Office 365 running in Linux without a VM.

Like it or not, the business world runs on Office.

I have quite a few machines under my direction, and I would drop Windows on every single one of them for employees that have never used Linux in their lives if I could be assured that they had Office and Teams.

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

#265

Post by DaSHacka »

badsectoracula wrote: post #259
pdpi wrote: 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.

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.

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

#266

Post by figmert »

computomatic wrote: post #130
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…

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.)

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.

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

#267

Post by sersi »

tombert wrote: post #237
ndriscoll wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#268

Post by crustaceansoup »

genodethrowaway wrote: post #252
wishfish wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only do the CRUDs have value but they're good for your sanity. I knew a guy back in the dot-com era. Very skilled coder. Backbone of the company. He pulled off miracles. Fulfilled impossible deadlines. Then one day, out of the blue, he quit. Took a job at a non-technical corp. They put him in a cubicle where he wrote Visual Basic CRUDs on an 8-5 schedule. No weird deadlines, no sleeping under the desk. He called…

ai slop

Never seen an LLM write so many short, halting sentences in a row. Very human.

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

#270

Post by sdenton4 »

owaislone wrote: post #178
ACS_Solver wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...
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