Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Questions about Wine on macOS.
Maximara
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Maximara »

Well the ARM Macs are here. Now what? Is Wine effectively dead on those Macs or will some form of x86 emulator/translator have to be included in the package? (I'm assuming ARM on Windows is a no go for licensing reasons)
Gcenx
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Gcenx »

Your asking on the forums you’d be better asking this question via the mailing list so wine developers can see the question.

CodeWeavers are still working on Apple silicon support but can’t really make too much more progress until they have an actual M1 system as the DTK is different. So expect an update to crossover sometime after release that supports Apple Silicon.

As for Winehq releases they haven’t competed the PE transition that needs to be completed before even attempting to deal with crating spec files for the reanimating items that need to be trunked without requiring a custom compiler
Maximara
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Maximara »

CrossOver Allows x86 Windows Apps to Run on Apple M1 Macs. Hopefully what they are doing gets passed to the open source community. Surprised it was this fast though.
Gcenx
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Gcenx »

Maximara wrote: Thu Nov 19, 2020 12:07 am CrossOver Allows x86 Windows Apps to Run on Apple M1 Macs. Hopefully what they are doing gets passed to the open source community. Surprised it was this fast though.
The reason this functions is due to wine32on64 is being used via Rosetta2.

As for wine32on64 Julliard won’t allow the current patches into upstream wine as it’s considered a hack and requires a custom compiler, maybe after the elf > pe transition is complete where a custom compiler is no longer required but a .spec file.
But I’d guess by the time that completed Apple will drop Rosetta2
TECH198
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by TECH198 »

What strikes me as odd no "32-bit code on Catalina".. However newer wine engines CX19.0.1 work just fine (PortyingKit for instance...)

i've often many older games pre-2006 to work no problem, but not one spefiic one Prey (2006)..

It's a Wine engine issue, so what makes older engines incompatible with Catalina exactly ? The game in question cannot be so unique, it just can't run, yet older games before 2006 i'm just fine.. I'm trying to pinpoint, why it doesn't work, when i believe it should.
Gcenx
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Gcenx »

TECH198 wrote: Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:24 pm What strikes me as odd no "32-bit code on Catalina".. However newer wine engines CX19.0.1 work just fine (PortyingKit for instance...)

i've often many older games pre-2006 to work no problem, but not one spefiic one Prey (2006)..

It's a Wine engine issue, so what makes older engines incompatible with Catalina exactly ? The game in question cannot be so unique, it just can't run, yet older games before 2006 i'm just fine.. I'm trying to pinpoint, why it doesn't work, when i believe it should.
Upstream wine doesn’t run on macOS Catalina and later due to Apple no longer providing 32Bit libraries and setting 32Bit code execution to disabled by default. (Can be enabled with a kernel boot arg but not much point)

The reason PortingKit/Wineskin function on macOS Catalina and greater is I provide a custom wine built from crossover-wine-19.

Currently the patches used to get this working are blocked from being merged into upstream as there considered a hack. (Requires a custom version of llvm/clang to build)
TECH198
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by TECH198 »

So, really the same reason for ALL patches equal a hack is actually the problem.... It goes deeper than that

'Depends on how its used' factors in too. And this is for the good. not for the bad. Its just more convenient to not go between the trees

a patch used for good, is still good. and is not a hack by any means if its restricted to the developers only.

After most of the DLL's are fake in Wine,, ? Would hat also be a hack Wine developers approved of by the way.. There is no difference here either,
Gcenx
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Gcenx »

TECH198 wrote: Tue Dec 29, 2020 12:49 am So, really the same reason for ALL patches equal a hack is actually the problem.... It goes deeper than that

'Depends on how its used' factors in too. And this is for the good. not for the bad. Its just more convenient to not go between the trees

a patch used for good, is still good. and is not a hack by any means if its restricted to the developers only.

After most of the DLL's are fake in Wine,, ? Would hat also be a hack Wine developers approved of by the way.. There is no difference here either,
It doesn't depend on how its used as HACKS don't be added into upstream wine these get stuck in Staging.

Wine implements Windows api calls on top of Unix. So while technically you "could" consider the entire wine project a large "HACK" you need to keep in mind that it's possible to compile WineD3D for example and use that on Windows.

Everyone is free to contact Julliard and ask him to explain his stance on these things, would I like to see the patches in upstream wine already?, of course I have the infrastructure already in place to build wine32on64 with all possible options and would be more than happy to open as many bug reports as needed for incompatible or broken features.

There's not many wine maintainers that own or have access to a mac, most are on Linux and while it's possible to cross-compile wine for macOS that doesn't mean they'll be able to test it. Some commits have compiled without issue but wine failed to function and this was macOS specific.

The current state of 32on64 would cause a huge headache for wine maintainers since to build it you're forced to ignore build errors (multiple build errors even for normal builds), multiple internal functions need to be changed to special versions that change depending on the arch that's being compiled etc.
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JoseskVolpe
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by JoseskVolpe »

Windows 10 and 11 also has ARM support now. While it isn't new Microsoft adopted ARM on Windows because it did before on Windows CE and Embedded versions, it's the first time default Windows is coming to ARM devices.
To run x86 applications on ARM, Microsoft implemented their own emulator, x64 emulation is available on Windows 11. But there's a performance loss.

That means that more ARM applications will be released as native for Windows on future, so Wine ARM support is also a feature to be improved for native ARM applications.
That means MacOS is not going to be left behind for future Windows applications because of the M1 chips. But it will indeed be a compatibility loss for most current and old applications if Wine don't support Rosetta 2 emulation.
vision_m
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by vision_m »

Hi :D well I may be late to the party but I just wanted to post an update here because it seems that this has not yet been mentioned and this is the most viewed thread under macOS. Probably many of you already know this but there are now, as far as I can tell, plenty of options for running 32bit windows applications on mac >= Catalina.

So I had just gone down the rabbit hole of building wine7 on mac Catalina and I have it building now in the background. I am going to try to build with WOW64 in order to run 32 bit applications not sure if it'll work but ill try anyway.

But thats complicated. First of all I have been using play on mac for quite some time with success running 32 bit applications. I have also found, according to the descriptions given by brew info, that wine-stable and wine-crossover both support 32 and 64 bit applications. Another option that I have not yet tested but seems promising if you would like self contained apps is WineSkin which says specifically in the README that
macOS Catalina support
WS11WineCX19.0.4 & WS11WineCX64Bit19.0.4 include wine32on64 meaning they function on macOS Catalina. 10.15.4 or greater.
All future WS11 Engines automatically mean Catalina is supported.
Anyway just hoping that this will be useful to someone. 8)
vision_m
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by vision_m »

After a bit more testing I now now that the wine-stable release will currently not run 32 bit applications but there are still a few other options there.
Bruninho
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Bruninho »

Hi, anyone know or who should I contact from the wine team to report a possible violation of its gnu gpl v2 license from another developer?
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JoseskVolpe
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by JoseskVolpe »

Bruninho wrote: Mon Jan 17, 2022 1:07 pm Hi, anyone know or who should I contact from the wine team to report a possible violation of its gnu gpl v2 license from another developer?
http://www.gpl-violations.org/ you can report GPL violations here
Also, Wine is LGPLv2
Gcenx
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Gcenx »

I’d first reach out on the wine-devel mailing list so Julliard can verify there’s actually a violation.
toke0
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by toke0 »

Hello,
a newbie here.

Suugestion:
How about putting in the front page of some section of Winehq, with big letters:

"Wine has (mostly) not been working with (most) Macs for THREE years now.
There might be a change sometime in the future.
We might post a note when this happens."

Because it is so frustrating that simple problems are not told to beginners and each and every of them has to waste few hours to figure the situation out.

Download page gives a hint for this: "Maintainer: none"
toke0
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by toke0 »

vision_m wrote: Wed Jan 12, 2022 9:28 pm First of all I have been using play on mac for quite some time with success running 32 bit applications.
I tried to use PlayOnMac with macMini2018, Monterey 12.3.1, PlayOnMac 4.4.3 and foobar2000 1.6.10.
Does not work.
Even the fb2k's installation windows' text are missing.
toke0
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by toke0 »

vision_m wrote: Wed Jan 12, 2022 9:28 pm Another option that I have not yet tested but seems promising if you would like self contained apps is WineSkin which says specifically in the README that
macOS Catalina support
WS11WineCX19.0.4 & WS11WineCX64Bit19.0.4 include wine32on64 meaning they function on macOS Catalina. 10.15.4 or greater.
All future WS11 Engines automatically mean Catalina is supported.
Can you try foobar2000 and if you get it working, you could tell which engines & settings?
Gcenx
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Re: Catalina and the future of Wine on Mac

Post by Gcenx »

toke0 wrote: Mon Apr 18, 2022 7:44 am Hello,
a newbie here.

Suugestion:
How about putting in the front page of some section of Winehq, with big letters:

"Wine has (mostly) not been working with (most) Macs for THREE years now.
There might be a change sometime in the future.
We might post a note when this happens."

Because it is so frustrating that simple problems are not told to beginners and each and every of them has to waste few hours to figure the situation out.

Download page gives a hint for this: "Maintainer: none"
The forums and the macOS downloads sections already listed macOS Catalina and later as not supported so I don’t see the problem.

As for “Maintainer: none”, while I could have that updated I see no point when we’re currently awaiting a major bug in winemac.drv to be resolved. Then again until the WoW64 work that’s currently happening is complete there won’t be any 32Bit support still.

The current Winehq macOS package maintainers are Gijs & myself, as explained there’s currently no point pushing packages to Winehq. For the moment these new packages are only being pushed to GitHub, these same packages can be installed via brew.
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