Wine 10.16 (dev) – Run Windows Applications on Linux, Bsd, Solaris and Macos
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The Wine project has released version 10.16, allowing users to run Windows applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and macOS, with the community generally welcoming the update and discussing its implications.
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Wine Is Not an Emulator!
Wine lets userspace code to be executed as is with the full permissions of the host system. It is more like an alternative executable format support package / subsystem. It needs to emulate the Windows system DLL calls, but everything else is no different than loading a piece of ELF executable and jumping into it.
For myself, I make every attempt to use words correctly.
The only difference is that only programs that fully uses userspace works, and anything that uses kernel driver will fail miserably. In this sense, games worked out the best because they usually have high level of independence and self-contained, with hardware abstraction layers to make things highly compatible.
If you want to talk about similar stuff, FreeBSD have a Linux compatibility layer similar to Wine. You can use that as a reference, despite both FreeBSD and Linux use ELF, and Windows use PE.
But to be honest at the end of the day, it's just program header describing code sections, library imports/exports and relocations, and this is why you can run Windows app on Linux basically untouched, given you can reverse engineer userspace Windows API calls 100% precisely.
And the legal aspect of it, well...
Also, there is a project called Winlator (https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator) that combines Wine + Box64/Box86 to run x86 games on Wine on Android. Now that is what I call an emulator since Box64/Box86 really is one.
(It is, unfortunately, newer and much less far along, probably purely because there's less dev-hours and dollars in it)
But yeah I agree, wine is an awesome emulator, and these people are heroes
(I’d love it to be true, it’s just, you know.)
> Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS
Obviously it gets used a lot on Linux (not only because of SteamOS using it through Proton, but that certainly contributes), I think I've read about people using it on Darwin, but how much testing/use does it get on the BSDs and Solaris?