The future of Wine on Mac....Wine dead on Mac in 18 months?

I see you thinking, wine dead in 18 months? Yeah, it’s a very very good possibility (not joking here…) “What does that mean? How come? ” Well, it’s the decision of Apple, “no more compromise”….to go over to 64 bit only. That will start in High Sierra 10.13x (yeah where we are in now and where we already ran into bumps), and most likely end in 64bit only next year already!!. “Hey wait, you guys mentioned that you are working on 64-bit Wine app?”. Yep that’s correct, but that doesn’t solve the fact that the games are still 32-bit, and Apple won’t accept 32-bit processes. This can’t be fixed by using a 64-bit Engine and creating a 64-bit Wineskin app unfortunately.

“So all is lost?” Well we have little hope on a specific project called “hangover” which Codeweavers (yeah from Crossover) and the wine community started up to find a way to keep Wine working on Mac (64bit) using ARM Emulator (an emulator between the windows app and the real CPU that we can put in any mode) which is a building block and would still need a lot of work (if even proven “workable/not too slow”) to be useful on the new Mac OS. There are maybe a few similar options, but also requires “emulation/virtualization” which means slow. So in short, there needs to come a solution (and I mean fast) but the “possible” (hope/pray) alternatives takes a lot of time to implant. Alexandre Julliart isn’t really mourning about that (and he shouldn’t), because Apple seems to be lost at this moment. It looks like everyone needs to adapt to the changes they make, we (wine(skin) community) had already to adapt 3 times already because of OS updates in the past years, and now it looks like they are about to give the final blow.

“So now what?” Well, thought about alternative solutions as well, and fell back to the same kind of solutions as Codeweavers comes with (emulation/virtualization) but then again you can even better put also VM’s and bootcamp on your system, and that’s not what we want.

So we are building hard on a Linux version of Porting Kit, so not all years we put in Porting Kit and into all the game ports, are lost. In that way we can still continue our vision on Linux, although in that case it will end for Mac in OS 10.13x or maybe even 10.14x. It’s not what we want, but Apple leaves is in that case no choice to abandon the sinking ship. For me if it comes that far that there is no solution for the 32-bit support drop, I will move over to Linux as well and we keep Porting Kit supported for Mac until OSX 10.14 and not above. Before it comes that far, let’s first hope there will be a solution in these 18 months after all…