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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 a lot of games better than Windows now (especially older games) shows a very strong attention to detail and a high tolerance for pain. I commend them for it.

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.)
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.

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.
It’s astounding how badly Microsoft had to fumble their complete and unassailable monopoly on the standard video game runtime (ie Windows) for an upstart like Valve to be able to get WINE/Proton into a place where this is now possible.

The mind reels. They had the biggest moat in tech, and now small shops are easily tossing homemade ladders across the gap. AAA gaming is an industry larger than all of Hollywood, and Windows is no longer a critical component. This is incompetence on an unthinkable scale.

I wonder when and how Excel’s stranglehold will eventually be cracked, and if I will live to see it. Perhaps the new agentic universe will cause someone to finally make the Pixelmator of Excel.

ReactOS also deserves an honorary mention. A lot of knowledge from that project feeds into Wine.
I simply wouldn’t have the patience to do what Elizabeth did, for a month, much less years. Really really impressive
I guess the silver lining is that the Windows ABI is extremely stable
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.

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.

> Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS

> Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS

> Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS

> Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS

Amazing. I don't understand the low level details on how such a massive speed gain was ripe for the picking but I welcome!

I guess thanks Valve for pouring money into Proton.

Steam devs if you are reading this: add a checkbox on your checkout screen that will allow me to donate 10% or a flat amount with each purchase, that will go directly to your upstream opensource dependencies like Wine & friends. I would add money to each purchase without blinking to support these people and I think the correct place for this is at the steam checkout screen, in the case for gamers.
Before anyone gets too excited about ntsync, the performance gains are (with few exceptions) mild, usually in the lower single percentage range. These extreme gains are the result of benching against vanilla wine without fsync, anyone playing demanding games on linux would have been doing so using fsync. This is mentioned in the article but treated like a side note. I've been running benchmarks between both and while the performance increase is real, please temper your expectations. A few titles might also run slightly worse.
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.
I am glad that a portion of the thousands of dollars I've given to Valve Corporation over the years has been gone to improve Wine for everybody. I wonder how many developers and contractors on the project are paid by Valve.
Wine might be oddly self-defeating. Broad game support on Linux increases the viability of Linux as a desktop, which increases market share, which may result in developers creating Linux ports as a 1st class concern, which don't need Wine to run.
If you're interested in technical notes on how the WoW64 thing works, I dug into Wine and implemented a similar thing in my (far inferior) emulator and wrote about it here, including some links to some Wine resources: https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2023/08/x86-x64-aarch64....
This is such an amazing accomplishment! Absolutely wild to see Linux basically re-implement Windows and doing it better, while MS is dead set on making everything about their software worse.
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.

If any Wine devs are reading this, I'd love to see a talk on this topic at the 2026 Carolina Code Conference. Call for Speakers is open until March 31st.
> This might sound like a small quality-of-life improvement, but it's a massive piece of engineering work. The WoW64 mode now handles OpenGL memory mappings, SCSI pass-through, and even 16-bit application support. Yes, 16-bit! If you've got ancient Windows software from the '90s that you need to run for whatever reason, Wine 11 has you covered.

Does that also apply to macOS? Even on Intel machines, Apple dropped 32-bit support many many years ago and IIRC it took ugly workarounds that weren't ever part of upstream WINE but of Crossover.

it seems if you want the same on macOS, this is the place to contribute:

https://github.com/Alien4042x/Wine-NTsync-Userspace-macOS-ba...

It seems like it would be possible to implement this in userspace using shared memory to store the data structures and using just one eventfd per thread to park/unpark (or a futex if not waiting for anything else), which should be fully correct and have similar or faster performance, at the cost of not being secure or robust against process crashes (which isn't a big problem for more Wine usage).

It seems that neither esync or fsync do this though - why?

Claude thinks that "nobody was motivated enough to write and debug the complex shared-memory waiter-list logic when simpler (if less correct) approaches worked for 95% of games, and when correctness finally mattered enough, the kernel was the more natural place to put it". Is that true?

Here's a link to try it

https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/download

awesome, finally wine is getting proper ntsync support... and i reckon wow64 will let me run so many old games...
Is the difference between the NT-style and POSIX-style semaphores essentially just that NT (and now this new API in Linux) supports setting a max value? Why don't POSIX semaphores support this?
I would happily pay even a subscription to Wine, if they manage to get Lightroom running smoothly. So far I need to run VM or use a Mac just to do that.
This is awesome news. One application I'd love to see run in Linux is Solidworks. Is there any interest in this, what would be the most effective way to support it financially, and how big a donation do you think it would take to achieve extremely good results? (Or will it forever be stuck in VM's using passthrough GPU's?)
I'd rather they focus on productivity apps than games. Linux has enough toxic users as it is. I'll praise wine when I can install 12yo office 2014
I predict a massive uptick in linux switchover as soon as installation and activation of some newer ms-office versions (2019, 2021 or 2024) become possible. I think 2019 was the first that shipped with a full fledged power query.

In my experience, as of now the one that works best and seamlessly is the 20 year old office 2007.

Hm, speculating a bit, but it feels like NTSYNC is essentially a beginning of NT Subsystem for Linux, or maybe ntoskrnl as a kernel module. Feels like the most clean and fast way to port Windows, since the rest of the interfaces are in the user space in real Windows. Essentially should be almost without overhead: user: [gdi32.dll,user32.dll,kernel32.dll -> ntdll.dll] -> kernel: [ntoskrnl.ko]
If someone can get the last decent ver. of Excel and Word running on Wine, that would be awesome
I wish competitive shooters (or rather their anti-cheats) would run on Linux. Only reason left to use Windows.
I wonder if having a /dev/ntsync device could make it easier for game devs to compile their games for linux in the first place, instead of having to use wine. There may be other windows specific dependencies though, but this is one less right?
Does it finally support visual studio?
If someone is interested in hearing the author Elizabeth Figura's views on Wine and Proton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNBKTolL5oQ
While I am not a big gamer anymore, I am curious whether this new Wine release make it possible to run Windows software such as Photoshop or Visual Studio on Linux with decent speed and decent resource usage.
I know that Wine devs are doing most of the hard works but also Valve team for doing the last mile: pushing for better UX, faster patches, pushing adoption (with their Deck device), etc...
Support for Xbox Game Pass games (typically deployed as UWP / containerized) would be absolutely amazing and likely the final nail in the coffin for Windows for gaming for many people.
I've heard in the past that ntsync is a big deal for audio plugins via yabridge as well. Not sure how much that's going to reduce the existing CPU penalty there.
Running most of my VSTs with wine + yabridge. Amazing that transcription layer/emulation software end up having less issues than running shit native.
so apparently it is Proton GE 10.9 from July'25 adding ntsync support [0].

I'm playing on wine now for several years now, my deepest respect for the developers involved. Thank you!

[0]: https://www.linuxcompatible.org/story/geproton109-released/

“And because Proton, SteamOS, and every downstream project builds on top of Wine, those gains trickle down to everyone.”

the gains would trickle up, no?

I'll be very interested to see how this plays out with final 3rd-party benchmarks.

Now if we can just get some decent Nvidia drivers......

Anybody know if NTSYNC support is why the Chrome OS team moved away from native Steam support?
Wine removed 32-bit support, breaking 90% of programs people used it for.
Not that it really matters, but does this article read as LLM authored to anyone else?
I had to close 3 ads before even half my screen was the article

And then it never was more than half…

I am trying to read this article on my phone without an ad blocker, and it is an impossible challenge.

Ads keeps loading and unloading, causing the page to jump around, and lose track of what I was reading.

The article is really interesting, but I am actively getting frustrated with my phone.