Wine Is Not an Emulator

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Lol, someone just tried to split hairs and argue semantics with me, telling me that Wine Is Not an Emulator.

“Did you know that wine is not an emulator? It’s right there in the name! That’s what the acronym stands for!” Uh herp derp.
(I see someone has read the same wine FAQ I read 20 years ago. Yay you!)

I just thought I’d take a moment to agree on a deep technical level with this sentiment. Wine is, indeed, not an emulator. To quote one of the pre-eminent geniuses of our time:

Wine translates windows "stuff" to native linux "stuff"

See, wine pretends to be a different system, and translates “stuff” from the windows system so that it can run on your native (linux) system.

But OTOH an emulator pretends to be a different system, and translates “stuff” from the emulated system so that it can run on your native (linux) system.

The main distinction between the two, of course, being that emulators tend to actually fucking work.

Note
I couldn’t bear the possibility of someone coming along and thinking I don’t actually know the difference / distinction that the wine pedants insist on, so just for the record: the difference is that an emulator emulates the hardware stack whereas wine is totally-definitely-not-at-all-”emulating” the software stack, i.e the windows API.

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