I mean, isn’t that kinda the goal…?
i would hope every new version of wine runs windows apps in linux and mac better than ever.
on average that’s the expected outcome, but sometimes there’s a regression here and there for specific apps
Patch notes: “Made the app a little worse just to keep things interesting.”
That’s the Microsoft strategy, but they forgot to make it better sometimes too
The Microsoft strategy often seems to be “It worked well, but we completely redid it because we need to justify out existence. Now it barely works with new bugs”
It’s been Android too at least since they stopped naming versions after sweets
Kit Kat was the last great android version for me
Rule #76: Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies.
Wine 1.1, now with AI integration
The trick is that isn’t a capital i, it is a lowercase L. Now with AL integration. Every program you run just has a picture of Weird Al and a snippet of a random song from his greatest hits album as a splash screen.
I’d run it.
Yeah, I think that’s the entire point of having a new version lol
Not sure how serious your comment is, but I could certainly imagine Microsoft introducing new dependencies/hooks/all-executables-must-support-copilot, etc., that break compatibility faster than Wine can keep up. Glad to hear that’s not the case!
For old stuff though…yeah, I’d hope it’s not moving backwards :)
At this point, and given the current state of Proton (👍) and the current state of Windows (👎), the question should be, “Does the new version of Wine run Windows apps better than Windows?”
I’ve managed to run some old games on Linux with Bottles/Wine that didn’t work on Windows anymore.
With some apps/games it definitely feels like it does. Would love to see someone dedicated do proper Wine vs windows benchmarks!
There are plenty of old applications that just do not run on windows 10/11 anymore at all. Wine and emulation is the only choice left for those.
There were some last year specifically for games on SteamOS vs Windows, like this: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-steamos-than-windows-11-ars-testing-finds/
Yes. It can run classic gaming that windows outright refuses to run. Wild
Yes. Especially if said application was developed before 2010.
I misread the title at first and I genuinely thought that’s what this article was about.
Proton works nicely in steam
Non steam games is an entirely different complicated issue (for some games)
You can download Proton for use outside of Steam, I use it in Lutris and Bottles pretty regularly. Also, you should be able to get just about anything to run just as well in Bottles or Lutris as it will in steam, but I will admit it can take some tinkering with some games or software and there is a much easier option: Add “non-steam game” in Steam library and run whatever program you need through Steam anyway.
Epic and GOG work on Heroic just fine and I’ve run two standalone games (Elite Dangerous and ESO) using Lutris with no problems.
Heroic works great for pirated hentai games and GOG games.
The next headline is going to be that they run better in wine than in windows.
Bugs and forced regressions?
The only thing I need to run on windows now is for H&R block tax software. I wonder if I can try it with wine but I’m afraid of losing the activation license
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=6532
Looks like not great/no one has tried for a few years. I say give it a shot (far from tax season) and report back!
I’m glad I don’t really have any apps that require windows any more; apart from Affinity, which doesn’t run in wine that well, and foobar2000, which genuinely works so well in wine that I might as well forget that there’s no native Linux release.
https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux
There’s a Wine fork tweaked especially for Affinity that works amazingly well.
I tried an Affinity-specific for of wine before, not sure if that’s the one, but it was very slow and crashed a lot. Although that was a few years ago, I’m sure it’s gotten a lot better.
highly recommend checking out mpc+rmpc. bread on penguins made me try. https://youtu.be/oTOu7VfXnl8
I’ve replaced fb2k with DeaDBeeF entirely.
Tried that and it’s good, but foobar is so much more customisable.
Sometimes I forget macOS exists
I love it because its existence means I get a good chance of having a UNIX-based machine in new corporate dev positions. If a company is giving me a work laptop, I’ll take a MBP over a Windows laptop any day (assuming I can’t install Linux)
I still can’t stand the Apple design philosophy no matter how much exposure. Mostly has to do with their “saving the user from themselves” restrictions in their operating systems. I’d rather defang windows instead, even if it takes much longer per machine.
Have you used a Mac in the last 10 years, beyond just flicking the mouse around at a FutureShop?
I’m using a Mac for software development at my current job. I prefer it over windows but I still hate it. Can’t even alt tab through windows on that piece of garbage without extra software.
You can cmd+tab between applications, and cmd+~ between windows of a given application.
I just want a list of all my windows, like pretty much every other window manager does. This just makes finding the correct window take more keypresses.
There’s numerous ways to accomplish this. If you want the windows of your current app, “App Expose” (Ctrl+Down, and then Left/Right/Up/Down to select) is what you want. If it’s all the windows, “Mission Control” (Ctrl+Up, granted you do have to click the window with the mouse) is what you want.
I just put each different program on a different virtual desktop and swipe through them.
Wow, that sounds awful. If you needed to use a touchpad their UX developers already failed.
Look, I’m not an apple fanboy by any means. I kinda hate their UX. So I’m not defending Apple by putting my suggestions here. I’d prefer a Linux desktop 100% obviously, but most jobs (in my experience) do not offer that unless you work for a company with a dedicated IT department.
First of all, I can cmd+tab to different apps/programs just fine. So I don’t know what feature your missing that you need additional software.
Second of all, you can use ctrl+arrowkeys to cycle between desktops without a touch pad.
Third, I use an Mx Master mouse with gestures mapped to the Gesture button on the mouse. I hold the button and move my mouse left and right, which switches desktops.
Honestly, I prefer virtual desktops to alt tabbing 100%. When I’m developing a web app, for instance, I have a browser desktop in between a front end code desktop and a backend code desktop. Viewing my changes is just holding down a mouse button and a quick flick of my wrist. Its consistent and quick.
You can do the separate desktops without using a touchpad, there are keyboard shortcuts to do that.
Yes, last contract IT job (Macbook Pro, approx 10 months ago). I wanted to smash it in half over my knee and grab a random Thinkpad with my ventoy usb in hand.
Why? What was so bad about it?
MacOS repeatedly got in my way when trying to run specialist software needed for my work at [organization], because I had the audacity to use an executable not in line with Apple’s walled garden. Additionally, transferring files was a pain in the nuts - so many “mac moments” of files resulting in 0 bytes after drive ejection and repeated permission error messages despite having the appropriate credentials active.
Throw in some minor annoyances with frankly unintuitive UX for general settings and layout configuration, and I was sick of the damn thing by day 3.
Made me miss my old job where I got to smash a vacated lab’s worth of Macs with a sledgehammer. And where I was allowed to bring my own laptop.
You can disable Gatekeeper entirely using the terminal. They just don’t expose the option in the UI anymore (which I think is fine).
For me it’s mostly the 3-4 key keyboard shortcuts that need about 1.5 hands to press comfortably. Yes, printscreen, I’m looking at you.
Also, why the fuck is F4 used to open the app drawer thingy? (no idea what it’s called) It’s do far away from where my hands normally rest!
I misread that as “Win 11 runs Linux and macOS apps better than ever” and was ready to sarcastically point out that Linux runs Linux apps better too.
Contrarily, Win 11 does run Windows apps worse than ever
Ooh, those are some lovely features. If only Nvidia hadn’t dropped support for 10xx cards as per 590.xx locking me on kernel 6.12, I might even have been able to enjoy using ntsync!
(Fuck Nvidia)
580xx on arch forever I presume then. Gonna be rough in a few years
Think Nouveau will catch up by then?
No. I don’t. Fingers crossed for arch supporting for many years
Yup :(
If anyone has experience in running Fusion 360 on wine plz shout up, that’s the last thing I need to work out before switching to Zorin…
It’s better with something like Winboat (virtualized windows container) within your OS than something like Wine. This is the same case for other “We don’t support Linux officially and actively block it because fuck you” productivity applications like Adobe’s suite.
Personally, I moved from Fusion360 to FreeCAD instead, but I haven’t heard anything negative about the Winboat method.
Fusion works flawlessly for me in winapps (and I’m sure winboat), but it is s-l-o-w. I probably need to figure out GPU passthrough and it might be bearable… But I haven’t had much time to dedicate figuring it out.
There’s a couple of Lutris scripts, but the one that kinda worked for me was this https://github.com/cryinkfly/Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux/
Depending on what you’re doing, check out Freecad. It’s still a bit buggy but ever since it hit 1.0 it’s been a lot better, and it runs natively on Linux
Yeah maybe this is the push to finally learn freecad!
Is there some reason you haven’t tried it yourself?
I only have one machine, so I wanna be confident it’ll work before messing around with new OSes
Run it on a usb stick
Can it run FLstudio?
It can with the addition of WineASIO, but unless this release has focused on fixes for this setup (which it may have done!), we’re still not ready.
I tried during the summer (albeit with Ableton rather than FL) and it’s still quite high latency which turns into weird noise and artifacting if I try reducing the buffer size (with much larger buffers than I typically use on windows).
YABridge for native DAWs is getting better though at least, this time around I got a few more of my VSTs working, I still have zero luck with any of the VSTs with licenses that I have on my iLok key.
I can’t wait for the day the guys working on this finally crack pro audio properly, it’s literally the only reason I still run windows on my desktop.
And since every time I mention this problem, I end up having to say this in a reply to someone: To anyone suggesting I don’t use Ableton or my VSTs that don’t work (of which there are hundreds), I’ve got two decades of Ableton projects that I can open up in windows and pretty much carry on working on it as if I created it yesterday. That’s before going into the fact I’ve spent a lot of money over the years on licences for this stuff, so being able to continue using it is more important to me than my operating system choice. Until I can do the same in Linux it’s gonna have to be a dual boot situation.
That said when I next have a weekend with nothing on, I’ll try this latest release
Any idea about USB drivers if it will ever be possible? I have synths and gear that needs firmware upgrades with flashers that only run on Win/Mac and I haven’t been able to get them to work with Wine.
It’s always possible, the bulk of the hardware Linux supports is proprietary stuff that someone had to reverse engineer at some point.
Whether a given niche piece of hardware, gets support for a non-essential-to-normal-operation feature such as firmware update support, is down to if someone is interested/motivated/determined enough to do the reverse engineering, write the driver and get it merged into the kernel.
Wouldn’t this rather be the case of proxy hardware layer for any driver to talk to that gets forwarded to the USB port in Linux? I mean the drivers are not for PC component but for talking with whatever device and chipset is connected to the PC over USB.
AFAIK there is no reason why vst companies wouldn’t produce linux builds, vst has been opened for Linux for a long time now, they just need to port it. iLok should also be possible, though I personally hate it, but I’m not a pro.
Yeah I think there are a few Linux compiled VSTs out there but IIRC there’s very little host support for them in native Linux, let alone into a host running under Wine. CLAP is probably what we should be banking on tbh since it was designed with Linux support in mind from the start.
I’m also not a big fan of iLok or any similar DRM, but if they’re going to enforce draconian licensing restrictions anyway, being able to move my key between machines and use all my licenses is actually a pretty valuable feature. Compared that to (let’s say Waves) stuff that will only let me license it on a single machine, and limits the number of times you can remote-revoke to a couple of times a year.
To anyone suggesting I don’t use Ableton or my VSTs that don’t work…
I hear you. I’ve been using Cubase and other older tools for over 20 years. I get that DAWs like Reaper or Bitwig would work better, but I really don’t want to retool as much as I want to avoid Windows. I’ve been meaning to to test out WinBoat whenever I have time, but not sure how DAWs perform in a VM either.
Very interesting comments. Does anybody know of a good linux alternative for FLStudio? I’ve seen LMMS, but I’ve also read it wasn’t quite there yet
I’d really like to run a newer version of Cubase myself. I’ve gotten older versions running on WINE, but 12+ has display issues and won’t even launch.
