[spoiler]

To be fair, early wine (when I first tried it) wasn't very usable, and for gaming specifically. So if you were an early enthusiast adopter, you might've just experienced their growing pains.

Also, I assume some Windows version jumps didn't make things easy for Wine either lol

[xattt]

The hype/performance mismatch was significant in the 2000s for Wine. I’m not sure if there was any actual use case aside from running obscure business software.

Yes, there was “the list” but there was no context and it was hard to replicate settings.

I think everyone tried running a contemporary version of Office and Photoshop, saw the installer spit out cryptic messages and just gave up. Enough time has passed with enough work done, and Wine now supports/getting to support the software we wanted all along.

Also, does anyone remember the rumours that OS X was going to run Windows applications?

[pxc]

I used WINE a lot in the 2000s, mostly for gaming. It was often pretty usable, but you often needed some hacky patches not suitable for inclusion in mainline. I played back then with Cedega and later CrossOver Games, but the games I played the most also had Mac ports so they had working OpenGL renderers.

My first memorable foray into Linux packaging was creating proper Ubuntu packages for builds of WINE that carried compatibility and performance patches for running Warcraft III and World of Warcraft.

Nowadays Proton is the distribution that includes such hacks where necessary, and there are lots of good options for managing per-game WINEPREFIXes including Wine itself. A lot of the UX around it has improved, and DirectX support has gotten really, really good.

But for me at least, WINE was genuinely useful as well as technically impressive even back then.

[zadikian]

I remember it being surprisingly decent for games back then. Then a lot of games moved to Steam, which made it way harder to run them in Wine. Of course there was later Proton for that, but not on Mac.

[anon291]

Games are one of the easier things to emulate since gaming mechanics are usually entirely a compute problem (and thus not super reliant on kernel APIs / system libraries). Most games contain the logic for their entire world and their UI. The main interface is via graphics APIs, which are better standardized and described, since they are attempting to expose GPU features.

I worked on many improvements to wine's Direct3d layers over a decade ago... it's shockingly "simple" to understand what's happening -- it's mostly a direct translation.

[aaronbrethorst]

Red Box: https://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/

[kelvinjps10]

Also these apps changed, A lot of windows programs were simple executables and I remenber for a moment it was very popular for developers to write portable apps that were just a .exe that you ran,also excel and other programs worked fine, but then microsoft and others started to use msxis or whatever it's called and more complex executable files and it was not longer posible, and microsoft and adobe switched to a subscription based system.

[Fnoord]

I ran Wine end of 90s to run CS (Half-Life), and I had not only more FPS than Windows. It was more stable as well.

[ryukoposting]

It took some futzing. The crusty PlayOnLinux UI is permanently etched into my brain.

[brnt]

Transgaming! It worked for ons or two games for me, bit it was glorious.