Help me understand (and KILL!) Aero hard requirement

[BobLovesWine]

Hey all.

Note this isn't about anything in particular or immediate, but something months/years back, it's just free time now to ponder the things that bother you.

We know Aero theming isn't supported; but some apps have hard requirements. How?! How did they build that way? It's not like they could make monolithic executables, they have no access to Windows source code unless they're Microsoft, and Microsoft wouldn't compile that way. Could the code required be somehow compacted into the executable as a blob, so end users can't see the files? Just guessing as it makes little sense to me.

I've only ran into a couple over the years, but they're ones I really needed to work, that the solution involved resorting to a VM. All are commercial software, and usually for a client not for me, but if you look on the wine_gaming subreddit you'll see games exist that have this issue too, usually the phoning-home kind of launcher / loader that's borderline spyware collecting usage metrics or providing a DLC store directly. ("hey it's our program we can do what we want!" -- sigh, corporate capitalist mentality.)

What is actually going on when they enforce Aero requirements, vs just a plain UI, I mean honestly I don't care if it looks like WfW 3.11 era Windows, as long as it displays *some* interface, vs a 216 error on ntdll or something generic error meaning "nope can't do it." So, if I don't understand how they're forcing that, someone does, or not... but what option do we have to force their code to run regardless of UI embedded?

Conversely - legal or not, we can still discuss this - can we rip uxtheme.dll et al out of an existing windows 7/8/+ install? At least trick it enough with WINEDLLOVERRIDES= to make the app appear? And, how much is actually needed, bare minimum, whether or not it would function correctly? Aero theming requires, what? Win7 and above, the Aero stuff itself, faking DWM and composition and transparency that might make Aero happy, probably somehow faking themes support in general (windows themes service passthru to the linux host desktop compositor?) Obviously if we can't find a legal d/l that MS allows, winetricks crew can't implement it, it'd be a manual or at least scripted sequence once you "find" the components needed.

I don't have any answers and I haven't found an open-source or freeware one that does this, to make the investigation easier. Maybe someone knows, though.

Finally - is this just not understanding the problem? Could it be looked at another way, and bypassed/ignored once a simple thing is done first? It's wine; that's always possible!

Anyway, thanks for reading.