Is Wine Still Relevant? - A Status Update on Wine
von Michael Stefaniuc (Wine Project)
Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, Mac OSX, & FreeBSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.
After 20+ years Wine continues to have a vibrant community as well as fast paced development. Stable releases are now the norm, with roughly one release per year and the upcomming release 1.8 is expected this summer.
Wine still remains the primary platform for gaming on Linux even after the advent of Steam on Linux. Current work in this area is focused on performance improvements (the magic command stream) as well as setting the base for D3D10 and D3D11 support. Another exciting development is Wine on Android including the port to the bionic libc, a native display driver as well as the ability to run x86 Win32 binaries on ARM devices using the qemu userland emulation.
We will also look at other use cases of Wine beyond the "classic" Games and Office.
Über den Autor Michael Stefaniuc:
