Until a few years ago, the idea of switching from Windows to Linux was at least scary, and this was due, among other things, to the small range of programs that were released compared to those released for Windows. However, things have changed since then, as not only have the programs released for Linux increased significantly, but also because now through a browser one can do tasks that until a few years ago were only done using third-party programs (e.g. Office365 web apps). And somewhere here Wine makes its appearance, an open source compatibility layer for Linux that comes to "run" even programs intended for Windows, on Linux.
As mentioned above, the years have passed and many programs have now been released for Linux distributions, free or not, making the transition from Windows to Linux less daunting than ever. Free image editing programs like Gimp and Davinci Resolve are now properly optimized, performing equally or even better than Windows, as they "run" on a much lighter operating system. But what about programs (or games) that have not been officially released for Linux operating systems?
Thanks to the Wine compatibility layer (which is NOT a Windows emulator) you can run Windows programs in a Linux environment. Today version 4.0 was released which brings about 6,000 changes (you can find here ) with the 4 main ones being the following:
- Vulkan support
- Direct3D 12 support
- Game controller support
- High-DPI support on Android
These changes are intended to make games run smoother, but they are not guaranteed to run flawlessly. While some programs may run correctly, others may hang, have bugs, or even not run at all. So for every program you want to test if it runs smoothly with Wine, you should do a test.
Finally, version 4.0 of Wine is not yet available from the official repos, so to download it you should refer here.
