6mo ago

What were the early days of WINE like?

Did it have more or less compatibility than it does now? Was it difficult to use? I started using Linux around 2016 and switched to it fully in 2020. In all my time I have only used WINE for gaming as most Windows desktop applications I have tried don't really work, not that I'd want to use many anyway. Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm just curious to hear peoples experiences.

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Wine used to involve a lot of black magic and trading configs to get things to work.
With the right incantations, and some luck and a few DLL replacements, you could make things mostly work.
3-D rendering was a shit show earlier on. You just didn’t even try. DirectX was everywhere and unusable. It was probably a slow march, but it felt like a sudden boom when 3D started working and suddenly 2/3 of your games/apps would work natively with a smaller config/spell.
Nothing like the lengthy spell castings of early wine. I summon thee brood wars!
I think I first used it around 2004ish. It was barely useful with basic applications without doing work, you could use it to have fairly decent support once you figured out the process. I think I was able to get an SNES emulator and a barely stable N64 emulator to run.
It was basically a best last option if you needed to run a windows program and couldn't/wouldn't do a dual boot.
So yeah, they definitely improved things.
For a time it had a commercial fork for gaming called WineX. It mostly handled DirectX and incompatible DRM. Still not nearly as reliable as Proton.
There were also a ton of helper programs like today. The general cycle was:
Wine on its own works well.
The more programs you add the worse it works.
A hip new helper comes along with program specific tweaks.
The tweaks start being over engineered.
The tweaks stop working in more and more cases as the Windows programs get updated.
return to 1.
I honestly thought that Lutris would have reached step 6 by now but so far it seems to be holding on.
If you weren’t a software engineer, you probably weren’t getting it to work for anything.
It didn't work particularly well.
I work with #Wine since that day where you also could copy a whole Windows folder into wine to get it work. Not long after that, I created my first Wine prefix for a Game I still have. For games which already worked I do see difference on the 3d quality. I'm a bit surprised that my 32bit games work without problems but are not able to be used with 32-64bit mixed mode. I'm a bit afraid of their future because I miss some installer or lost licence keys and simply copied the games from Linux to Linux the last 20 years.
Over the year, I'm not anymore a gamer. I collect my games and currently watch the development of #GOW #GamesOnWhales and plan to create a Gameserver for my children.
My problem currently are Business application like from #Autodesk, #Solidworks or similar. Which even not install. And it seems some new UI tools Microsoft introduces and the new store also not work.
I basically only used it via crossover office way back when when there was a time I had to use Lotus Notes for email.

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