It has more support for more software, includes a lot of graphics speedups, and even supports retina displays on Mac. Now Wine 2.0 is out, which is a huge milestone for the project. It's a quixotic effort, both because Windows is so large and complicated, and because it's a moving target. Where an application expects Windows to provide or service or resource, or respond to commands, Wine steps in and attempts to do the job. 'Wine,' which stands for 'Wine Is Not an Emulator,' acts as a substitute for Windows. In my experience, it almost never works, but it often almost works, which is still impressive. It happens less often (in my experience) as a Mac user, but eventually some tantalizing gaming experience or obscure utility will call across the void, and there's no way your 128GB SSD has enough room for a Boot Camp copy of Windows.Īnd that's when Wine pops into memory: the 23-year project to run Windows applications on Linux, Mac, and other Unix-like operating systems. Typically, on Linux, it's around day one. There comes a time in every alternative OS user's life when they decide they'd actually like to use a program that typically runs on Microsoft Windows.