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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

Crazy how, thanks to Wine/Proton, Linux is now more compatible with old Windows games than Windows itself. There are a lot of games from the 90s and even the 00s that require jumping through a lot of hoops to run on Windows, but through Steam they're click-to-play on Linux.

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Wine works on windows too. It's used by the shorthorn project to get software for newer versions of windows to run under XP.

Yep, for some games like Elden Ring it even fixes Windows-specific performance hiccups: https://youtu.be/vAooLiCy7rE

Whoa. Can it be used to run older software on newer Windows too?

GOG used to ship Wine ddraw.dll with some games although for this specific use case there are better options now (e.g. cnc-ddraw).

My gaming PC isn't compatible with windows 11, so it was the first to get upgraded to Linux. Immediate and significant improvement in experience.

Windows kept logging down the system trying to download a dozen different language versions of word (for which I didn't have a licence and didn't want regardless). Steam kept going into a crash restart cycle. Virus scanner was ... being difficult.

Everything just works on Linux except some games on proton have some sound issues that I still need to work out.

>> some sound issues

Is this 1998? Linux is forever having sound issues. Why is sound so hard?

Sound (oss, alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire...), bluetooth, WiFi are eternal problematic Linux paper cuts.

As always It is Not Linux Fault, but it is Linux Problem.

It's one of the reasons why I moved to OSX + Linux virtual machine. I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the hardware quality of a 128GB unified RAM MacBookPro M4 Max is way beyond anything else in the market.

I think the situation has flipped in the past few years. Since Pipewire came out, I haven't had any problems with audio on Linux and I can dial the latency down to single-digit ms. Meanwhile, on Mac audio has gotten far worse, especially since Tahoe. The latency is tens of ms and I get crackling and skipping when there's high CPU usage.

Audio is still broken pretty regularly in davinci resolve on Linux. Sometimes I need to restart the application to make audio work. And I can’t record sound within resolve at all.

It doesn’t help that they only officially support rocky Linux. I use mint. I assume there’s some magic pipewire / alsa / pulseaudio commands I can run that would glue everything together properly. But I can’t figure it out. It just seems so complicated.

This sounds like a hardware / firmware problem specific to your particular sound chip / card.

Similarly, Bluetooth on my Thinkpad T14 is slightly wonky, and it sometimes fails to register a Bluetooth mouse on wake-up (I have to switch the mouse off and back on). This mouse registers fine on my other Linux machines. The logs show a report from a kernel driver saying that the BT chip behaved weirdly.

Binary-blob firmware, and physical hardware, do have bugs, and there's little an OS can do about that, Linux or otherwise. Macs have less hardware variety and higher prices, which makes their hardware errata lists shorter, but not empty.

That’s possible, but the hardware (a rodecaster pro 2 connected over usb) works just fine in other Linux apps. I can record audio in audacity. And I can play back audio in resolve. I just can’t record audio in resolve.

I think it’s a software issue in how resolve uses the Linux audio stack. But I have no idea how to get started debugging it. I’ve never had any problems with the same hardware in windows, or the same software (resolve) on macOS.

It is hard to blame Linux if only one proprietary app has sound issues.

FWIW I lost sound completely 3 times in the last 2 months on my works windows laptop and it would only come back after a reboot. I assumed it was a driver crash.

Yep, adding onto this, Bitwig's native Linux app has amazing Pipewire integration. It works like an ASIO plugged right into your desktop's audio, letting you attach channels to windows or apps and handle complex monitor/performance/mixing outputs.

It depends on having a properly good implementation, which will come eventually for most apps.

In some games I get a crackle in the audio which I don't get through any native application, nor some games run with proton. I don't know if that's what he means, but it hasn't bothered me enough to figure it out. I use bluetooth headphones anyway, I'm relatively insensitive to audio fidelity.

If you run pw-top, you might see errors accumulating. This is usually due to an underrun from the game requesting an audio quantum that’s too low.

The fix is:

    mkdir -p ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d && echo "context.properties = {default.clock.min-quantum = 1024}" | tee ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/pipewire.conf

Basically, just force the quantum to be higher. Often it defaults to 64, which is around 1ms.

The problem is games over Wine/Proton doing weird things with the sound. Not the sound itself on modern Linux. Heck, I have less issues using audio stuff, or just changing the audio volume on Linux than on the crappy Windows.

Linux sound is fine at least for me. The problem is running Windows games in proton. Sound will suddenly stop, then come back delayed. Apparently a known issue on some systems.

Pipewire + lowlatency kernel fixes 99% sound issues

> Why is sound so hard?

Because they keep "updating" it every couple of years. Though, "updating" in latest years, meant just adding additional layers on top of ALSA. SW design and engineering is hard.

To be fair, you can have sound issues on windows too. It's not usually on issue on linux anymore either though.

It kinda works both ways, just yesterday I tried to play the Linux native version of 8bit.runner and it didn't work, I had to install the Windows (beta) version and run it through proton.

Funny story: I use Anki (the flashcard program), and I run it on my NixOS laptop. There is a NixOS/nixpkgs package for Anki. It doesn't work. You know how I run Anki, which has a native GNU/Linux version and even an actual nixpkgs package, on my GNU/Linux NixOS laptop? Yeah, I run AnkiDroid, the Android version, through Waydroid. Because the Android version works.

Anki seems to be a habitual offender, I was never able to install it reproducibly and in an obvious way on several distros and always ended up building it from source.

> There are a lot of games from the 90s and even the 00s that require jumping through a lot of hoops to run on Windows

What are some examples?

Pretty much all the Renderware based GTAs have issues these days that only community made patches can mitigate.

A recent example is that in San Andreas, the seaplane never spawns if you're running Windows 11 24H2 or newer. All of it due to a bug that's always been in the game, but only the recent changes in Windows caused it to show up. If anybody's interested, you can read the investigation on it here: https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2025/04/23/gta-san-andreas...

I remember seeing a thread about that bug here on HN a while ago, that was a fun read.

The last time I tried to run Tachyon: The Fringe was Windows 10, and it failed. IIRC I could launch it and play, but there was a non-zero chance that a FMV cutscene would cause it to freeze.

I see there are guides on Steam forums on how to get it to run under Windows 11 [0], and they are quite involved for someone not overly familiar with computers outside of gaming.

0: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=29344...

Lemmings Revolutions. Apparently to run in something else that is not Windows 95/98/Me requires some unofficial .EXE patch that you could download from some shady website. The file is now nowehre to be found.

It's a great game, unfortunately right now I am not able to play it anymore :( even though I have the original CD.

Unfortunately, Wine is of no help here :(

Also original Commandos games.

Anything around DirectX 10 and older has issues with Windows, these days.

One more popular example is Grid 2, another is Morrowind. Both crash on launch, unless you tweak a lot of things, and even then it won't always succeed.

Need for Speed II: SE is "platinum" on Wine, and pretty much unable to be run at all on Windows 11.

Sidenote:

Whilst Morrowind is fine under Wine, there's a fantastic engine rebuild called OpenMW [0]. It runs on both Windows and Linux natively.

Some of the memory limits are also lifted, which meant I have a few mods that weren't possible without hacks in the past [1].

[0] https://openmw.org/

[1] https://morromod.netlify.app/

Unfortunately the modding community is split because OpenMW only cares about supporting the original game and not the script extender ecosystem that modders have built around it.

Isn’t this because the wine db has those tweaks pre configured?

Windows used to be half operating system, half preconfigured compatibility tweaks for all kinds of applications. That's how it kept its backwards compatibility.

It's because wine OS selector actually tries to match bug for bug the OS version you set but Window's one gave up after Windows 7.

More a case of DirectX radically changing how it worked [0].

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3darti...

Red Alert 2. Then there's games like Dark Forces II that work but don't work with hardware rendering out of the box so they look like crap. I've also had games like Grid complain I didn't have enough VRAM (because I had more than 2GB), games that were tricky to get working because I used a 4K monitor (Sims 2, Crysis 2). And there's games where the original release is borked but a newer version on GoG is okay like Alpha Centauri.

slightly off the main topic, but if you wanna run dark forces II with gpu acceleration and texture filtering etc, try out OpenJKDF2

i got this working on my linux install (on risc-v nonetheless!) with a compile and some small tweaks it works well (getting 100+fps with filtering and ssao etc)

[0] https://github.com/shinyquagsire23/OpenJKDF2

I remember not getting Close Combat 2 (from 1997) running on Windows 10 some years ago but I did getting it running under Wine, albeit with some tweaks.

Whether that was a Windows compatibility issue or potentially some display driver thing, I'm not sure. (90's Windows games may have used some DirectDraw features that just don't get that much attention nowadays, which I think may have been the issue, but my memory's a bit spotty.)

Anything written with SafeDisk DRM e.g. medal of honor allied assault.

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