Just realized the Linux page had its own section on Wine which ends up obscuring this page, so I'm removing the section from there entirely. The contents of it can be found below, if anyone is interested in adding some of it to this page.
Wine
Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer which allows users to run Windows programs in Linux. Its main advantage is a wide support of Windows versions ranging from 3.11 to Windows 10, both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. There are multiple versions of Wine each with their own differences:
- Normal
- Staging - Provides additional features such as CSMT which may or may not improve the performance of the game and contains community-made patches which improves the compatibility.
- Proton - A fork of Wine created by Valve and CodeWeavers which includes special patches and additional addons such as DXVK, FAudio, and ESync. It is intended for gaming and does not require Steam to use.
- Proton-GE - A fork of Proton by GloriousEggroll which has FFmpeg enabled for FAudio by default, and all of Proton's patches ported over to be applied to WINE, as well as Wine-Staging and VKD3D. Proton-GE will generally work better with games, and some specific games only work on GE. The ProtonDB will contain pertinent information.
- tkg - Considered to be a "Wine to rule them all!" it contains a large set of patches and features from other community projects to provide the best performance and compatibility for games. It can be easily customized. It was mainly made for Arch Linux and its derivatives, but it is possible to use it in other distributions.
- Gallium Nine - Uses Gallium3D State Tracker, which dramatically improves the performance for games using DirectX 9, as it won’t translate Direct3D calls into OpenGL. So far only AMD, Nvidia graphics cards which rely on open source drivers and Intel graphics using Iris or Crocus driver have a support for Gallium 3D Nine which greatly benefits the compatibility and performance with DirectX 9-based games.
There are many frontends to Wine, which improves the experience with using it:
Name | Release | Notes |
---|---|---|
Lutris | Free |
|
Bottles | Free |
|
PlayOnLinux | Free |
|
Crossover | Commercial |
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Q4Wine | Free |
|