What were the early days of WINE like? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by daggermoon@lemmy.world to c/linuxquestions@lemmy.zip

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Did it have more or less compatibility than it does now? Was it difficult to use? I started using Linux around 2016 and switched to it fully in 2020. In all my time I have only used WINE for gaming as most Windows desktop applications I have tried don't really work, not that I'd want to use many anyway. Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm just curious to hear peoples experiences.

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[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 7 points 1 day ago

For a time it had a commercial fork for gaming called WineX. It mostly handled DirectX and incompatible DRM. Still not nearly as reliable as Proton.

There were also a ton of helper programs like today. The general cycle was:

Wine on its own works well.
The more programs you add the worse it works.
A hip new helper comes along with program specific tweaks.
The tweaks start being over engineered.
The tweaks stop working in more and more cases as the Windows programs get updated.
return to 1.

I honestly thought that Lutris would have reached step 6 by now but so far it seems to be holding on.

this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025

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