[johnnyanmac]

>Why? What difference does it make?

Security and peace of mind? Weathering myself/ourselves from the whims of billion dollar corporations? It's personal, I never said it was rational.

I've worked on all kinds of tech in industry hampered because it didn't make money fast enough, or because a change of management happened and they didn't care how beneficial the work we were doing was. I've seen changes in-house I absolutely hated that fractured support for making portable software, because portability isn't profitable. Call it bitterness and rebellion that I want to focus my long term bets on software I can control. Or software others can control should I go mad or get hit by a bus.

> Fighting the status quo should be focused on actually improving things.

And I feel like I am. WINE isn't in the way of my mission and if there are plenty of games choosing to run both natively and via WINE, that's great. Choice is nice. If there's some weird point where WINE runs better than native, that's an issue I want to fix. But the native ports need to exist first.

WINE is a great step gap, but simply that.

[OkayPhysicist]

If it's peace of mind you're after, it seems like encouraging developers to target older versions of the Win32 API is a far more effective goal. Linux with Wine can have support for those forever, and Windows, with their almost pathological commitment to backwards compatibility will be able to run them them, too.

Linux APIs, in contrast, are far more varied, and change a lot more. So the "peace of mind" argument actually favors Win32.

[johnnyanmac]

> it seems like encouraging developers to target older versions of the Win32 API is a far more effective goal.

Perhaps, but I don't know how long that will last, and how hard that goal will be to migrate future windows to older windows. I don't see much point basing my goals on the uncertainties of proprietary software.

>and Windows, with their almost pathological commitment to backwards compatibility will be able to run them them, too.

Likewise, Windows does this for now. Microsoft isn't immune to changing course, and their track record isn't even great to begin with when we consider the 90's. I don't want to rely on the assumption that a trillion dollar corporation will always value legacy content. Enterprise tend to be pretty good at legacy support, but it still has a shelf life (unless you're COBOL I suppose. But I don't think Microsoft deals with as much safety/mission critical software as banks).