[sthuck]

2003 me thought Wine is a dead end project and a waste of developer time. Granted valve put a lot of effort into Proton but they wouldn't even have considered it without the massive amount of work done before, kudus to all the non cynical wine devs

[eterm]

2003 me was optimistic that wine was a dead-end, with games like Neverwinter Nights, and Quake 3 Arena having native linux releases.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.

[miffy900]

for the longest time, no one in linux land cared about API stability or backward compatibility - then app/game developers realised if they could port a portion of Win32 to Linux via WINE, they could just target the win32 API or at least a portion of it and so long as WINE was installed, their app/game would always work. i find it a bit ironic; desktop Linux is being enabled by re-implementing APIs from another OS.

[wavemode]

It's like they always say: win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.

[TheCycoONE]

Turns out Linux needed a stable abi for games and Wine provided.

[buildbot]

Which amusingly, also serves as a stable API for Windows now too.

[Zambyte]

Such is life dealing with propriety software.

[gpderetta]

Aside on whether it was going to be useful, I was alway impressed by the Wine developers, extremely knowledgeable hackers, masters of both Windows and Unix.

[buyucu]

The real gamechanger (pun intended!) was Vulkan. DXVK is very performant.