Anyone have experience with distributing win32 programs for Linux and/or MacOS by bundling wine? I take it that statically linking is out of the question, but I am guessing you could make an AppImage binary for linux that includes wine, and for MacOS you could include wine in the app bundle. I haven't tried either though. I'm interested in this so I can use win32 as a cross-platform desktop GUI library.
This started out with bundling wine in appimages, but is expanded a lot. The author created a new appimage alternative that adds some stuff to make games work more reliably. I’ve used this several times to create portable versions of old windows games for my Steam Deck. It’s awesome!
Flathub offers the org.winehq.Wine package, which you can use in the base and base-version fields of your own package's manifest. It wouldn't cause your code to be statically linked with Wine. Your package could then be distributed from your own flatpak remote.
There was an announcement about a year ago of an effort to make a paid flatpak market, apparently to be called Flathub LLC. I don't know if that effort is still active.
I think Qt would yield better results than Wine for most things. Since your comment suggests that you're making proprietary software, you would have to take special care with linking or else submit to the Qt Group's commercial license terms.
I've seen a few russian pirated game releases for linux do this, they just bundle a copy of wine (downloaded from the same places as e.g. lutris gets it from), and a start script that sets the WINEPREFIX variable to a pre-populated prefix, with the game already installed and all the needed registry configurations already present.
I suppose you could bundle all this in an AppImage, the annoying part however is that the WINEPREFIX is supposed to be read-write, so you'd have to set it to some place specific to your app, to avoid messing with the user's main prefix. These prefixes are huge (hundreds of MB upon creation), so I'm not sure I'd consider this a desireable solution.
If this is your distribution method, consider having the user install wine before running your app.
I'm curious why you'd want this over using a GUI library that is actually cross-platform? The way you've worded things suggests to me that you're building something new.
I want to go back to making desktop programs the way we used to before they turned into web apps that bundled chrome. I know I should just use Qt but I have some experience already with win32, and all the programs I have fond memories of are written with it (foobar2000, winamp, Everything, etc).
Have you considered Tk? Visually, it's quite like Win32, but it's fully cross-platform and (as of Tcl 9.0) has basic screen-reader support – so no mucking around with OLEACC shims or IAccessible2, as you'd need for COMCTL32. And it supports virtually everything Win32 does, with the ability to drop down to platform-specific sorcery (i.e., Win32) if the need arises.
It is. But if you mean .NET WinForms then you don't really need Wine because Wine uses Mono to run .NET executables. If using WPF then you should check out Avalonia UI [1] which is a cross-platform alternative that is also probably better (and has good tooling in VS). There's also .NET MAUI [2] but it's maybe not as good for desktop apps.
Truly amazing software. I only recently learned that Crossover, which enables running windows software (mainly games) on MacOS, is built on Wine and significantly contributes to Wine Development.
This is all amazing work. Is there a list of applications/games that previously didn't work that now do (like what Dolphin puts out)? I'd love to understand what the improvements mean in a practical sense.
I didn't know about WoW64 mode. I remember when trying to install an old windows program I had to install a bunch of 32-bit translation library for audio and stuff. This WoW64 means that I can just simply use 64-bit arch. This is fabulous.
Congrats on ntsync and new wow64 support! Those are two huge features released last year.
ntsync allows efficient and correct synchronization usage that matches logic of Windows and new wow64 allows running 32-bit Windows programs without 32-bit Linux dependencies.
Go does hardcode system call numbers on Linux, but it doesn't on Windows. Instead it follows the normal Windows convention of calling the userspace wrappers from kernel32.dll and similar libraries.
Unlike on Linux, the low-level syscall numbers on the NT kernel are highly unstable across releases, so programs that try to call them directly will generally only work on a very specific kernel version.
Userland DRMs do all sort of nonsense. Kernel anticheats wouldn't use the syscalls, they're already able to call the kernel routines they want directly.
While I agree that it is amazing work, I feel the need to call out the wine team because, as many likely know, a redditor (admittedly of unknown origin, to me at least) felt the need to go to Valve prior to the wine team. Valve, of course, kicked the PR back over to the wine team, which I actually think is fine. The issue, I think, "may possibly" be the wine team.
The PR was well documented, does not initially appear to be related to AI, and it makes a PITA installer work FFS. Further, my own PRs to wine were accepted for less decades ago and are still in use now.
Forgive the rant, however the redditor in question was scared to send the PR to Wine due to politics. That tells me there is definitely too much middle management in an open source project.
Some news outlets did report on it. However, in my experience after testing the patch applied on top of Wine 11.0, both the Creative Cloud and the Photoshop installer did not work.
I suppose that the thing that the patch fixes is the "offline" Photoshop installers, which are not provided anymore unless if you ask Adobe nicely... or if you get it from third party sources. The PR's creator did say that they didn't pay for Creative Cloud, so I think it is likely that this is what happened.
This made me wonder if anyone had actually tested the patches with a legit Creative Cloud/Photoshop installer, or if everyone just ran with the PR saying "look it works now!!!" but nobody bothered to actually test it. The creator did submit their own precompiled Wine version, however that version is meant to be run via Proton, so I wasn't able to make it work because I don't know how to run things via Proton outside of Steam.
I was able to get the Creative Cloud app in Wine (set to Windows 10 mode) by using some very dubious methods, as in, I asked Claude Code to implement the stub to see what would happen because if AI is sooo good as how people are saying, it should be able to fix things in Wine... right? And surprisingly, it did actually work.
However you aren't able to use Photoshop CC 2021 (the earliest Photoshop version you can install from Creative Cloud, newer versions crash during startup) because the activation popup does not render the input controls. The reason why I think it is trying to render something is because the activation popup background does have the same color as the Adobe website and, if my memory is correct, in Windows that popup is used to ask for your Adobe account credentials.
(And yes, sadly the PR patch does not fix the activation screen)
Of course, if you bypass the activation using... alternatives means, Photoshop CC 2021 does work under Wine, which is why you can find a lot of "Photoshop CC 2021 in Wine!" repositories on GitHub.
I’d like to thank them for this, specifically! I had some old applications that weren’t working in the old WoW mode.
https://github.com/gameimage/gameimage
This started out with bundling wine in appimages, but is expanded a lot. The author created a new appimage alternative that adds some stuff to make games work more reliably. I’ve used this several times to create portable versions of old windows games for my Steam Deck. It’s awesome!
Flathub offers the org.winehq.Wine package, which you can use in the base and base-version fields of your own package's manifest. It wouldn't cause your code to be statically linked with Wine. Your package could then be distributed from your own flatpak remote.
There was an announcement about a year ago of an effort to make a paid flatpak market, apparently to be called Flathub LLC. I don't know if that effort is still active.
https://discourse.flathub.org/t/request-for-proposals-flathu...
Winelib might also be worth considering, depending on how you are able to navigate the relevant licenses.
https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G...
I think Qt would yield better results than Wine for most things. Since your comment suggests that you're making proprietary software, you would have to take special care with linking or else submit to the Qt Group's commercial license terms.
If this is your distribution method, consider having the user install wine before running your app.
[1] https://avaloniaui.net/ [2] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui
Instead of making your own GUI library, you could just make a shim that translates to whatever framework you want to support.
See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-int...
WoW64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64
> https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2019/12/10/celebrati...
Which is kind of funny because yet again windows was a better application in terms of longevity than MacOS native.
That being said, apparently the 2016 version is gold-rated on WineHQ: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
ntsync allows efficient and correct synchronization usage that matches logic of Windows and new wow64 allows running 32-bit Windows programs without 32-bit Linux dependencies.
Other than antivirus software and maybe MAYBE kernel-level "anticheat" slop - who in their right mind does straight syscalls to the kernel?
https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.25.6:src/...
Unlike on Linux, the low-level syscall numbers on the NT kernel are highly unstable across releases, so programs that try to call them directly will generally only work on a very specific kernel version.
The PR was well documented, does not initially appear to be related to AI, and it makes a PITA installer work FFS. Further, my own PRs to wine were accepted for less decades ago and are still in use now.
Forgive the rant, however the redditor in question was scared to send the PR to Wine due to politics. That tells me there is definitely too much middle management in an open source project.
Some news outlets did report on it. However, in my experience after testing the patch applied on top of Wine 11.0, both the Creative Cloud and the Photoshop installer did not work.
I suppose that the thing that the patch fixes is the "offline" Photoshop installers, which are not provided anymore unless if you ask Adobe nicely... or if you get it from third party sources. The PR's creator did say that they didn't pay for Creative Cloud, so I think it is likely that this is what happened.
This made me wonder if anyone had actually tested the patches with a legit Creative Cloud/Photoshop installer, or if everyone just ran with the PR saying "look it works now!!!" but nobody bothered to actually test it. The creator did submit their own precompiled Wine version, however that version is meant to be run via Proton, so I wasn't able to make it work because I don't know how to run things via Proton outside of Steam.
I was able to get the Creative Cloud app in Wine (set to Windows 10 mode) by using some very dubious methods, as in, I asked Claude Code to implement the stub to see what would happen because if AI is sooo good as how people are saying, it should be able to fix things in Wine... right? And surprisingly, it did actually work.
However you aren't able to use Photoshop CC 2021 (the earliest Photoshop version you can install from Creative Cloud, newer versions crash during startup) because the activation popup does not render the input controls. The reason why I think it is trying to render something is because the activation popup background does have the same color as the Adobe website and, if my memory is correct, in Windows that popup is used to ask for your Adobe account credentials.
(And yes, sadly the PR patch does not fix the activation screen)
Of course, if you bypass the activation using... alternatives means, Photoshop CC 2021 does work under Wine, which is why you can find a lot of "Photoshop CC 2021 in Wine!" repositories on GitHub.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qdgd73/i_mad...
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57980