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Comment by Cacti | Hacker News Reader

What is the technical use case for Wine these days? Are we basically talking running certain Windows applications on Linux, at reasonable framerates, using hardware that doesn't support full virtualization pass-through? In other words, if you've got virtualization support, and pcie pass-through support, why not just run this stuff through a Windows VM?

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> What is the technical use case for Wine these days?

Gaming on Linux using Windows games is a widely common use case. Wine works very well for most DX9 games already, but DX11 support is still quite WIP.

> if you've got virtualization support, and pcie pass-through support, why not just run this stuff through a Windows VM?

Because you don't want to run Windows? There can be multiple reasons for the later.

I remember many years ago you at best had a chance to get opengl games working under wine; getting anything directX working was a pipe dream.

Today most DirecX 9 games work flawlessly out of the box (including one click install from steam, also running under wine).

I use GOG installers, but yes, Wine today comparing to its early days is simply amazing.

So I don't have to have the overhead of a full Windows virtual machine draining my laptop battery and filling my SSD with updates I didn't ask for to run the few windows-only applications I use.

I make extensive use of alt-tab. I have yet to find a smooth way to switch between applications running inside a VM and applications running outside the VM.

I also haven't found a way to achieve acceptable video performance inside a VM, short of dedicating a graphics card and doing a full PCI-E passthrough.

I don't have to buy a windows license to run windows software.

My one use case is that I have a legal copy of Photoshop 7.0 from the early 2000s that is my main image editing software that I'm still using on an almost weekly basis thanks to Wine.

Wine's support for 16-bit Windows applications is actually better than in Windows 10.

If I try to start up a VM with XP I've got to worry about XP's security situation.

It lets me run some of my favorite Window's programs like quickpar, winscp and windiff on my Mac without the bulk of a VM or requirement for a Windows license to run on that VM. I also don't have to maintain a Window's install.

The license is LGPL, somewhat different than Microsoft's.

That's why I specified technical reasons.

I've used Wine on macOS to play indie games (typically 2D GameMaker games). It's way easier than booting up a VM.

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