His approach is a bit different as he is shimming 16 bit APIs to their 64-bit equivalent. Wine reimplemented them to run on top of a POSIX environment.

His approach will result in higher fidelity for apps as they are basically running on Win64, just with a 16-bit virtual machine driving it.

Wine apps running on Windows would likely feel non-native as the UI components are reimplemented from scratch.

Well, the UI components in Wine feel like Windows, just not like Windows 10.

Windows 98 perhaps. 2000 if generous.

Yes, they have the “Windows Classic” look and feel.

Wine actually has (mostly) functional theming support-- point Wine to a .msstyles theme DLL and it'll draw themed controls (rather than the Windows Classic style default).

They just don't ship a theme with Wine; understandable for licensing reasons (they can't distribute Microsoft's designs), but it means that Wine looks like Windows 2000 out of the box.

The .msstyles support in Wine was terribly slow last time I tried it. Has it improved?

I find it a bit amusing that were they to "update" their look to that of the flat Windows 8+ UI, it would probably entail the removal of a lot of code.

...and yet even on a 25MHz 386, no one complained about the slow drawing speed of the "fancy" 3D buttons in Win3.x.

Well, modern flat design generally also includes a much more animated interface, which would probably entail the addition of much more code. And I don't think the drawing speed of buttons was ever a very strong reason for the rise of flat design - though I completely understand your distaste for it.

16-bit applications can't run in long mode (i.e. a 64-bit OS), so you'll need a 32-bit OS to run these apps in WINE. WINE is just a shim and a library reimplementation, not an emulator, so it just passes the instructions on to the CPU, and you're limited by what the CPU can do.

Hmm... I wonder if you can run 16-bit applications in WINE on a 32-bit VirtualBox VM running on a 64-bit Linux system. That sounds like overkill, though. Might as well just use PCem or DOSbox, depending on your use case (PCem: cycle-accurate emulation of a whole PC, including specific hardware models and running any OS a real PC could; DOSbox: playing some old games for fun).

TBH, I'm not sure what win3mu's point is, either: it probably won't be open-source, and right now the only reason to not use PCem or DOSbox is if you don't own a legitimate copy of Win3.1 and you're not willing to pirate it. An open-source clone of Windows 3.1 that can run any Win16 program in long mode (by interpreting the instructions like an actual emulator) would be a great idea, but this isn't it.

64-bit Wine has been capable of running Win16 apps for years. It does require the Win16 app to be fully protected mode, but it works fine.

Yes, you can.

Wine already does run on Windows (not well), no WSL needed. Some users already use it to play old games that only run on Win 98 for example.

Source?

(Are you referring to the use of software like Colinux and Andlinux? Those only worked on 32-bit systems last time I checked...)

I haven't been involved with Wine in a long time but the Wine test suite itself is regularly run on Windows:

https://test.winehq.org/data/

Here's an admittedly very old article by Dan Kegel on how to compile it on Windows: http://www.kegel.com/wine/wow.html

But yeah, I don't think it's explicitly supported since it's not their target market :) Codeweavers' focus is running Windows apps on Mac and Linux (Crossover - go support them! https://www.codeweavers.com/)

Edit: It looks like they completely dropped support for it as I can't find any of the old articles anymore; Seems it only supports mingw setup now. https://wiki.winehq.org/Cygwin_and_More

What's the difference between Wine, Crossover and PlayOnLinux?

Crossover is a commercial version of Wine which includes a bunch of extra hacks for popular applications. It comes with support. It's how the Wine project pays salaries.

PlayOnLinux is a Wine wrapper which has preset configurations (best known working wine version and dll overrides) for a ton of popular games/software. Think of it like a virtualenv on steroids.

Win3mu seems to be an emulator, Wine does not.

Wine is an emulator if you're running 16-bit apps.