2003 me was optimistic that wine was a dead-end, with games like Neverwinter Nights, and Quake 3 Arena having native linux releases.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop was near, and wine would surely be a temporary stop-gap.

for the longest time, no one in linux land cared about API stability or backward compatibility - then app/game developers realised if they could port a portion of Win32 to Linux via WINE, they could just target the win32 API or at least a portion of it and so long as WINE was installed, their app/game would always work. i find it a bit ironic; desktop Linux is being enabled by re-implementing APIs from another OS.

It's like they always say: win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.

Turns out Linux needed a stable abi for games and Wine provided.

Which amusingly, also serves as a stable API for Windows now too.

Such is life dealing with propriety software.

Aside on whether it was going to be useful, I was alway impressed by the Wine developers, extremely knowledgeable hackers, masters of both Windows and Unix.

The real gamechanger (pun intended!) was Vulkan. DXVK is very performant.