Stop Whining about Penguin and Grab a WINE (WINE Is not an emulator in Linux)
one of the biggest obstacle while migrating your system to gnu/linux is, you have to part with your beloved games. This obstacle is really big even for me, who got a love with computer and technology from video game that plays in computer. But this obstacle is just another new stuff that need to be explored, as i discover there are way to play my favorite video game in gnu/linux system. Moreover i can learn more stuff by installing new game instead of waiting like i usually did on my old operating system, it feels like hitting two bird with one stone.
so there are many way to play your windows game in gnu/linux, like you know gnu/linux love giving it’s user more freedom, like choosing how they gonna play their game. you could play game that already ported to linux and play natively using your preferred game portal (steam, gog, etc), you can play it on virtual machine (this one might not run as good as the other), and last but not least you can use compatibility layer that can make windows application to run in linux system. for this article i gonna try to explain what i know about compatibility layer and wine as windows compatibility layer in Unix or unix like system.
so what i know is, compatibility layer is an interface or system that make application for certain system able to run in different system with an assistance of compatibility layer. just imagine that there are toaster with european electrical plug, but your house only have american electrical socket, you really want to eat toast but you cant just force your toaster plug into incompatible socket. so you look around and found an electrical plug converter so that you can use those shove that european plug toaster into into american electrical socket and have your delicious toasted bread. From this imagery you can say that toaster and it’s electrical plug is a software/ game that we want to run, electrical sockets nearby are our system/operating system, and those plug /socket converter is the compatibility layer.
Now, a disclaimer before i’m spouting something wrong, im also still learning how WINE works so if there are some wrong information that i give, please feel free to tell me in comment, i just want to share what i know in order to inform people and myself about how awesome WINE and gnu/linux is.
WINE intially stands for WINdows Emulator but it changed to Wine Is Not Emulator, i know that abbreviation seems weird but i believe that kind of thing is popular at the time it changed. So with this WINE you can run almost every application/software, limited to windows system in Unix system. so how does wine do that ? did they just emulating windows in linux system? No, they are recreating every (yes everything) stuff that needed to run an windows application in Unix system. so it would hurt them to call WINE as an emulator. WINE is able to provide runnable window application with lesser resource than installing windows, but it is also possible to run window application with native-like experience on Unix System (yes including MacOSX).
So, Yeah WINE is awesome it provide Linux with windows limited application, so that mean we dont need to make Linux application right because WINE already provide such ease? NO, running an windows application in linux is not flawless, there are many drawback, like it’s performance compared with native application are worse, not only that by developing windows only application you force people to use window as it’s first option giving more power to proprietary software to control their consumer, moreover having native application is much better option to have. in other hand WINE developer also developing a library that helps developer to port their windows only application to be able to run in linux/Unix System.
Enough talking about weird stuff that complicated for my brain. now you can get wine working on your system by going to
you can read on how to install on your various linux distribution system, or maybe mac. im gonna write another article about installing Wine on Ubuntu system later, for now that’s all i got for today. please dont be shy to write comment about how messy my words or explanation was so i can correct it and provide you with better writing.
thank you for reading this far :)
P.S. : I managed to successfully play one of my favourite game which Osu! with just few minute of installation setup, thanks to wine :)
