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Comment by computomatic | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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Valve's Proton (so Wine + DXVK + some other additions) revolutionized gaming on Linux. I play games both for fun and work, and for a solid 3+ years now, gaming on Linux has been an "it just works" experience for me, and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.

I really is impressive. I wish publishers like EA and anti-cheat developers weren't so reluctant to support it. I hope Steam devices and SteamOS gain enough traction to force their hands.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/03/ea-javelin-anticheat-j...

Idk, kernel anti cheat is a pretty clear sign to me that I should pick a different game to play anyway...

Does windows make it easy to tell the installer wants to install kernel anti cheat? It used to pop up the generic binary "This application wants to change files on your computer" which could be installing in the protected "Program Files" or could be modifying anything.

I dont think you can even load the "windows" kernel module in wine. Last time i tried with the capcom rootkit, it didnt work at all.

Wine doesn't emulate the NT kernel; Just the NT and Win32 userspace APIs. For example, Wine provides a `kernel32.dll` that maps API calls into the appropriate Linux ones. Anything kernel level is operating "below" Wine.

I read the person I was responding to saying they avoided games with root kits for moral, not technical, reasons. So I assumed they were on Windows, and AFAIK, windows just offers binary "changes" permissions which covers anything from installing in the slightly protected Program Files directory to installing a rootkit. In other words, can they even detect they are about to install a root kit?

Good question and one I am now looking into

Ironically the only way I would ever consider robust anti-cheet is if the game installed a seperate bootable Linux witch didn't have the encryption keys for my main partition.

you may be on to something here. "you want to play our game, boot it off a usb drive"

Paying for a game that inserts rootkits into your kernel feels like paying money to get molested. no thanks.

Hate to be the one saying this, but that rootkit is there to prevent you from molesting/cheating other players. So its not an one-sided issue. It is unfortunate that the developers found no other way of fighting cheats, sure.

And by all means, if a game community is so toxic that it has to be policed by extreme measures, it is perhaps indeed better to avoid playing such a game altogether.

agreed. if a condition of attending an event was that I had to wear a chastity belt that prevented guests from raping each other, I'd think twice about attending alltogether.

I don’t care if my shooter game “community” is toxic. I don’t have any interaction with the “community” other than to try and virtually kill its members. I wish my chess app had anti-cheat, there are just some people who will cheat and any game is more fun if they can be prevented from playing.

Because anti cheat on linux is completely useless.

By and large Im happy to not participate in games that use kernel level anti-cheat.

Now if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies (like the Wine team), that would be amazing! I would add extra money on every purchase to support these people!

https://www.winehq.org/donate

Requires PayPal or credit card. The suggestion was to pay with your Steam Wallet or whatever payment method already used when you buy a Proton-based game on Steam.

for 99% of people it will also probably be paypal or credit card

> Donate to the Wine Development Fund by cash, cheque, or international money order in US dollars.

IMHO this supports the original point that payment via Steam would be an upgrade:

Sending cash to a postal address isn't low-effort nor low-risk.

Payment by cheque is something I have never done, nor would I know how to do it. I'd have to ask at my bank -- not low effort. I don't know if I'm an outlier here but I have never heard from any of my peers who ever did such a thing.

The same or even worse is true for international money orders. The whole concept of making a money transfer to a postal address is something I have never heard of. Where's the IBAN?

The Wine team is right to put even PayPal before all of these.

The best low overhead way to support them for Americans is to set up bill pay with their bank and auto send checks to their mailbox

Can you have a Steam Wallet without having a credit card?

Yes, I do. It just means that you have to manually "recharge" your Steam wallet when it runs low. That's some effort, but it limits the possible damage if something goes wrong.

How do you "recharge" you Steam Wallet? Gift cards, I assume?

Yep, depending on where you live you can probably find them wherever you find other major brand gift cards.

Paysafe cards. A store near me has them.

i pay for crossover license (wine on mac), if i understand correctly, they spend this money on development wine core as well.

This is a fantastic idea. I completely endorse it. I hope a Valve employee sees this.

You always give 30% to Valve and their interests so far are aligned. Everything that's possible within the Steam ecosystem is available outside of it. Maybe things will change in the future, but I doubt we could be getting a better deal.

Great idea!

Such donations might even be tax-deductible revenue for Valve, so even the finance bros should love it.

Although I would prefer if Valve simply commits to a fixed percentage of its Steam fee to be donated...

Forwarded donations are not tax-deductible (in the US); That's a lie that's been spread around the internet. If you give a company money with the express purpose of them forwarding it to someone else (the company acts as a "collection agent"), it's not their income or donation.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-gets-tax-benefit-thos...

And even if it was, all "tax deductible" would mean is that they wouldn't have to pay taxes on that money. Which, you know, they don't get to spend. So it's kind of defacto tax deductible in the same sense that my friend's income is "tax deductible" for me, I guess.

A lot of people online have convinced themselves that "tax deductible" means that the government would refund you that dollar amount. That's a "tax credit"... If forwarded donations were a tax credit, then yes, rounding up is giving the company "free" money! But you're not.

Interesting, thanks for the details.

So it would be actually financially _better_ for Valve to donate a portion of their revenue and state "we will donate x% of the price to yy", as THEN it would be tax-deductible for them

It's not better, because being revenue and donated away and tax-deductible all cancels out. It's as if they never saw the money, just like forwarding it.

Buy a steam deck. It sends a strong signal to Valve to continue supporting Wine and you get a Steam Deck

I'm in Africa, when I go to the steam deck page, it says it is not available in my country. Not interested in buying from a third party importer. So until then..

What about buying from a fellow Hacker News nerd? I'm willing to handle shipping a new unit for you, based in USA. :-)

I also have a used 1st-gen model, upgraded with hall-effect joysticks and a 2TB SSD with a glass screen protector that I am willing to part with. Apart from a few barely-visible scuffs on the plastic housing, it's in great condition. If you're interested, let me know how to get in touch!

Unfortunately Steam decks have been out of stock for a while. The AI slop Apocalypse ruined the consumer computing market with chip shortages.

it's was out of stock as soon as they came out and in a lot of countries outside of the US it wasn't available.

I wanted to buy the entire new lineup (Machine, VR, and controller), but alas, AI RAM shortage. I hope it can get released soon.

> if only Steam would add a checkbox on their checkout page to add 10% donation/tip that goes directly to their upstream opensource dependencies

Or how about instead of passing the cost off to users, Steam actually supports them from their own profits? After all, they are profiting from free work.

We can't be pushovers about this.

As far as I can tell, Valve makes significant contributions back to Wine via Proton development. Isn't that essentially them supporting their upstream dependencies with their own profits, by using some of those profits to pay people to contribute work to their open source dependencies?

No.

Valve pays over a hundred open source developers to work on the various open source projects that they rely on so heavily, so yeah Valve's 30% of your Steam purchases is already contributing to these open-source projects (like Mesa, the Linux kernel, Wayland, etc.)

https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-is-paying-a-whole-lot-of-devel...

Value does pay for development on open source projects already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34061110

> and should be for most games that don't use kernel-level anticheat.

It actually gives a far better user experience for games like Battlefield 6, because on Linux they just don't work at all. Try it for yourself - it won't even start!

By contrast if you run Battlefield 6 on Windows, eventually you'll end up playing it, and you'll wish you hadn't. It's a shitty buggy mess and you'll hate it.

So, notch up another score for Linux!

It's reached the level where a game not working is a suprise.

Space Marine 2 was the latest one for me, but Steam is great at refunds if you do it quickly enough.

Space Marine 2 works, at least on steam deck

Yea it seems very variable depending on hw / config etc. And the most recent patch at the time (I think this was during summer?) broke it for a bunch of other people on desktop that had it working before.

For me it crashed after the first click in the menu.

With Proton especially, which is WINE really optimized with all of the right options and a few other things, I play literally any game on linux and never worry about support. It hasn't steered me wrong yet in the last 3 or 4 years I think.

It has gotten to the point where I just skip buying games that don't work under proton, and there's really very few that I've missed.

To be fair, early wine (when I first tried it) wasn't very usable, and for gaming specifically. So if you were an early enthusiast adopter, you might've just experienced their growing pains.

Also, I assume some Windows version jumps didn't make things easy for Wine either lol

The hype/performance mismatch was significant in the 2000s for Wine. I’m not sure if there was any actual use case aside from running obscure business software.

Yes, there was “the list” but there was no context and it was hard to replicate settings.

I think everyone tried running a contemporary version of Office and Photoshop, saw the installer spit out cryptic messages and just gave up. Enough time has passed with enough work done, and Wine now supports/getting to support the software we wanted all along.

Also, does anyone remember the rumours that OS X was going to run Windows applications?

I ran Wine end of 90s to run CS (Half-Life), and I had not only more FPS than Windows. It was more stable as well.

Red Box: https://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/

I remember it being surprisingly decent for games back then. Then a lot of games moved to Steam, which made it way harder to run them in Wine. Of course there was later Proton for that, but not on Mac.

Games are one of the easier things to emulate since gaming mechanics are usually entirely a compute problem (and thus not super reliant on kernel APIs / system libraries). Most games contain the logic for their entire world and their UI. The main interface is via graphics APIs, which are better standardized and described, since they are attempting to expose GPU features.

I worked on many improvements to wine's Direct3d layers over a decade ago... it's shockingly "simple" to understand what's happening -- it's mostly a direct translation.

I used WINE a lot in the 2000s, mostly for gaming. It was often pretty usable, but you often needed some hacky patches not suitable for inclusion in mainline. I played back then with Cedega and later CrossOver Games, but the games I played the most also had Mac ports so they had working OpenGL renderers.

My first memorable foray into Linux packaging was creating proper Ubuntu packages for builds of WINE that carried compatibility and performance patches for running Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.

Nowadays Proton is the distribution that includes such hacks where necessary, and there are lots of good options for managing per-game WINEPREFIXes including Wine itself. A lot of the UX around it has improved, and DirectX support has gotten really, really good.

But for me at least, WINE was genuinely useful as well as technically impressive even back then.

Also these apps changed, A lot of windows programs were simple executables and I remenber for a moment it was very popular for developers to write portable apps that were just a .exe that you ran,also excel and other programs worked fine, but then microsoft and others started to use msxis or whatever it's called and more complex executable files and it was not longer posible, and microsoft and adobe switched to a subscription based system.

It took some futzing. The crusty PlayOnLinux UI is permanently etched into my brain.

Transgaming! It worked for ons or two games for me, bit it was glorious.

I remember managing to play Crysis under Linux with Wine and I was SO impressed. Never would’ve imagined one day almost every game would be playable.

It's an unfair fear since architecturally Wine sits at the same position as the Win32 API on Windows, which also in the end merely uses the underlying native system calls. The only difference is that Linux aims to keep its system call interface stable.

You're saying that Windows' system interfaces aren't stable? In comparison to Linux?

win32 dates back to 1993. OP doesn't know Windows history. Maintaining backwards compatibility was always a huge priority for Microsoft, even if it couldn't be perfect.

If a program didn't work on a newer version of Windows, there's a good chance it was doing something unsupported.

The API underneath the Win32 API, the Windows Native API, is not necessarily stable and therefore not intended for direct consumption by applications.

If you're utilizing undocumented APIs that aren't meant for public use, sure... but the core Win32 APIs have been pretty stable for going on 3+ decades now. You can take a lot of win32 apps from the early 90's and they'll run without modification in windows today... though, they'll probably run in Wine and likely a better chance there... but still.

I fully agree with that. Sadly there is always the odd application out there that uses the lower level stuff and is therefore tricky to get to run on Wine. Or more recent Windows versions for that matter.

Meanwhile I've been impressed with Wine since I discovered it. One of the few things that was keeping me from moving to Linux was MS Office suite. I struggled to get used to OpenOffice. And wine was able to run it. Sure I had to faff around with it, but I was just so impressed. I was telling all my family, but they just didn't get it.

Anyway, I later stopped using it because Google Docs and then later libreoffice was good enough. I still followed it, and I continued to be impressed by all the announcements.

The first time I seriously used wine it was to run Forscan (https://forscan.org/home.html) to interface with my car via OBD2 port. It quite literally just worked. Installed via the executable MSI installer, finished install, booted right up, and worked with the USB device.

I have been using Wine on Mac for fifteen years now since I moved to Mac for work. There's always been a couple Windows programs I just can't seem to replace fully, namely RegexBuddy, and I continue to run them in Wine to this day. Everything has gotten so much better as the years have gone on, that this is a perfectly acceptable solution.

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