The open source Wine project—sometimes stylized WINE, for Wine Is Not an Emulator—has become an important tool for companies and individuals who want to make Windows apps and games run on operating systems like Linux or even macOS.
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Yesterday, the Wine project announced the stable release of version 10.0, the next major version of the compatibility layer that is not an emulator. The headliner for this release is support for ARM64EC, the application binary interface (ABI) used for Arm apps in Windows 11, but the release notes say that the release contains "over 6,000 individual changes" produced over "a year of development effort."
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Wine's ARM64EC support does have one limitation that will keep it from working on some prominent Arm Linux distributions, at least by default: the release notes say it "requires the system page size to be 4K
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Asahi Linux, the Fedora-based distribution that's working to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, uses 16K pages because that's all Apple's processors support. Some versions of the Raspberry Pi OS also default to a 16K page size, though it's possible to switch to 4K for compatibility's sake. Given that the Raspberry Pi and Asahi Linux are two of the biggest Linux-on-Arm projects going right now, that does at least somewhat limit the appeal of ARM64EC support in Wine. But as we've seen with Proton and other successful Wine-based compatibility layers, laying the groundwork now can deliver big benefits down the road.Other new additions to Wine 10.0 include improved support for high-DPI displays, which should be better at automatically scaling app windows that aren't DPI-aware.
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Though various version of Windows have been running on Arm processors for over a decade now, last year was when the project became a credible mainstream computing platform.
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Microsoft also released the Windows 11 24H2 update, which looks like another routine yearly update on the surface but included large under-the-hood overhauls of Windows' compiler, kernel, and scheduler that improved performance for Arm chips as well as some x86 chips. Microsoft also updated and branded its x86-to-Arm code translation feature, now called "Prism."
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Finally—and most relevantly, for people using Wine—the company convinced a critical mass of major app developers to release versions of their apps that ran natively on the Arm versions of Windows. That included major browsers like Google Chrome, creative apps like Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo, and productivity apps like Dropbox and Google Drive.
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(Score: 1, Flamebait) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 25, @03:11PM (2 children)
My experience with WINE is that it works great unless the software uses Restrictions of some sort. Roblox used to work in WINE, until the Roblox developers added anti-cheating measures, basically stuff to prevent the players from using macros and examining game data outside of the game, that do not work in WINE.
Another dicey area is pirated software. There are legitimate reasons to use software in which the corporate control has been broken. But a big problem is that pirate versions are all too likely to be infected. WINE does not run virus infested jailbroken software any too well or at all, and everyone is afraid to help with that.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday January 25, @04:17PM
Wine doesn't sandbox nor does it do anything to prevent cracks. They legally can't take requests to support cracked software. But if you write and submit a minimal example using the same missing function calls or even implement the missing function calls yourself, they'll accept them.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 27, @05:04PM
Whether something is "jailbroken" / "cracked" / "pirated" shouldn't have any bearing on whether it will run in WINE or not. However, it stands to reason that the developers will not support your "jailbroken" / "cracked" / "pirated" software. WINE should "just work" as far as launching and running software that was designed to run on Windows. Also, anti-cheat software may actively try to break compatibility with WINE, because STUPID, the end.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday January 25, @05:47PM (2 children)
Major apps run online. The OS is just a bootloader for Chrome. The ONE exception at home seems to be Steam, which does not exist AFAIK at this time, and MS365/Office on ARM for megacorporates which does exist and supposedly works well.
Personally I use considerable development tools on windows because sometimes that's all they ship or its the path of by far the least resistance. But anything else that doesn't involve talking to a segger j-link over a USB is pretty much run online usually in a docker container and accessed solely in chrome.
I'm struggling to think of the last windows-native application I ran that isn't crazy developer stuff (Quartus, Espressif's... thing, the STM32 suite from ST, etc), Chrome, or Steam/gaming.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday January 26, @10:44AM
> I'm struggling to think of the last windows-native application I ran that isn't crazy developer stuff
The stuff I run is IDEs, compilers, pdf browsers and occasionally Libre/MS Office and browser. The only thing that has an online component is MS Office.
I realise your post was about windows, but as an aside I notice that in mobile land the push is in exactly the opposite direction - stuff which is trivial in a browser e.g. paying for car parking or train tickets - they all want to install some spy/crapware on my mobile device. Sick Sad World.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 27, @05:32PM
Lots of "major apps" have an "online component" and as such work in a web browser. The more an app can siphon your data, the better, as far as corporations are concerned. However, I would consider "LibreOffice" a "major app", which is also a great alternative to the MS365 subscription model. LibreOffice is free and "isn't a browser based" app. There are plenty of useful apps that aren't browser based. Here's a nice slew of Open Source and/or Freeware apps that aren't browser based: Notepad++, Audacity, GIMP, DOSBox, (pretty much any of the various media burning applications, my favorites being cdrtfe, ImgBurn, and InfraRecorder), VLC, VirtualDub, Calibre, CPU-Z, GPU-Z, WinMerge, 7-Zip, various IDEs (My favorite and generally the one I use, PyCharm.), Blender, Godot Game Engine, Unreal Game Engine, Unity Game Engine, and many more. Most of those have paid-software alternatives and/or have paid-options themselves (Unreal/Unity). Just because a browser can be a useful thing, doesn't mean it is the only thing there is.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"