Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains

https://www.xda-developers.com/wine-11-rewrites-linux-runs-windows-games-speed-gains/

Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at the kernel level, and the speed gains are massive

Wine 11 is the biggest jump for Linux gaming in years.

XDA

Wine is a project that I've grown a near-infinite level of respect for.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a lot of the work for Wine is boring and thankless. Digging through and trying to get exact parity with both the documented and undocumented behavior of Windows for the past 30 years doesn't sound fun, but it's finding every little weird edge case that makes Wine a viable product.

The fact that Wine runs a lot of games better than Windows now (especially older games) shows a very strong attention to detail and a high tolerance for pain. I commend them for it.

It is a superb project, and a hard thing to do.

It is a pity that the apps most business people use everyday, like Word and Excel and Outlook don't work in it (Excel 2010 is the last version that has Platinum status). It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.

> It is interesting that these are harder to get working than games.

Games are mostly just doing their own thing, only interacting with the system for input & output. MS Office is using every single corner of Windows: every feature in the XML libraries, tons of .NET type stuff, all the OLE and COM and typelib and compound storage features, tons of Explorer integrations, auto-updating stuff via Windows patching mechanisms... there's almost no corner of the Windows OS that MS Office doesn't use.

So that's what's keeping Microsoft from just running WINE on an MS-flavored Linux or perhaps a clean slate kernel as their next OS. I've been wondering for a while, this is by far the best explanation.
The Windows Kernel (and arguably the Windows APIs) are the only good part of Windows; they should dump everything else and run Linux above it; wait they did do that and then changed it to a boring VM.