14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine project has been an immensely important project in the history of Unix, but its importance is diminishing with each passing day.
Up until a year ago, when a new Wine version showed up, people would rush to download and install it. The changelogs were full of fixes for games and applications, and there were talks about replicating Direct X, in some way or another.
Moreover, the Internet was full of tutorials on how to make the major games released on Windows work on Linux, like Diablo 3 or Borderlands 2.
Sometime in the last year or so, the interest for Wine has decreased considerably. The application is still being developed and a reasonable number of fixes and changes are still being implemented with each new version, but nothing spectacular ever changes.
From time to time, we hear that Blizzard is banning people running Diablo 3 or World of Warcraft through Wine, but nothing beyond that. We have to wonder, what will happen with Wine?
Granted, there are still a number of applications that have no replacement in the Linux world and sometimes you just need to run Outlook in Wine, but its uses have been limited by the developers who are porting their apps.
It seems that the only question that remains is not whether Wine will endure, but how long it will take for the Wine developers to lose interest because of the sheer amount of porting being done.
To be fair, a lot of Wine users are gamers, and the rise of the Steam for Linux platform in the last year has made a great impact. Many developers are now releasing Linux versions of their software for the first time just because Steam had such a big, resounding success.
Wine had an interesting history, but it's quite likely that the very thing that made the software so popular, gaming, is the same thing that will probably bury it.