Did it have more or less compatibility than it does now? Was it difficult to use? I started using Linux around 2016 and switched to it fully in 2020. In all my time I have only used WINE for gaming as most Windows desktop applications I have tried don’t really work, not that I’d want to use many anyway. Sorry if this is a dumb question, I’m just curious to hear peoples experiences.
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It didn’t work particularly well.
If you weren’t a software engineer, you probably weren’t getting it to work for anything.
Wine used to involve a lot of black magic and trading configs to get things to work.
With the right incantations, and some luck and a few DLL replacements, you could make things mostly work.
3-D rendering was a shit show earlier on. You just didn’t even try. DirectX was everywhere and unusable. It was probably a slow march, but it felt like a sudden boom when 3D started working and suddenly 2/3 of your games/apps would work natively with a smaller config/spell.
Nothing like the lengthy spell castings of early wine. I summon thee brood wars!
Not sure what to say, yes, it was more difficult. I remember getting games from humble bundles that were Windows only, got those bundles for the Linux games it had. Some of them I got to work easily, others were just not running or had performance issues.
For a time it had a commercial fork for gaming called WineX. It mostly handled DirectX and incompatible DRM. Still not nearly as reliable as Proton.
There were also a ton of helper programs like today. The general cycle was:
- Wine on its own works well.
- The more programs you add the worse it works.
- A hip new helper comes along with program specific tweaks.
- The tweaks start being over engineered.
- The tweaks stop working in more and more cases as the Windows programs get updated.
- return to 1.
I honestly thought that Lutris would have reached step 6 by now but so far it seems to be holding on.
I think I first used it around 2004ish. It was barely useful with basic applications without doing work, you could use it to have fairly decent support once you figured out the process. I think I was able to get an SNES emulator and a barely stable N64 emulator to run.
It was basically a best last option if you needed to run a windows program and couldn’t/wouldn’t do a dual boot.
So yeah, they definitely improved things.
I basically only used it via crossover office way back when when there was a time I had to use Lotus Notes for email.
