Wine 11 might be the tipping point that finally pushes gamers from Windows to Linux

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Wine 11 brings near-native performance to Windows games on Linux.

Thanks to NTSYNC, performance bottlenecks are a thing of the past.

Wine 11 is now available in most distro default repositories.

I remember, in 1999, when I used Wine for the first time to run the original Diablo game. I thought I'd done something very special (as did all of my Linux-curious friends). Back then, running games with Wine was no easy feat.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and Wine has made massive strides forward. It seemed Linux was on the precipice of something great. Then Valve stepped into the picture and ramped up support on Linux for Windows games, and things moved from the possible to the probable.

Also: My 11 favorite Linux distributions of all time, ranked

And now, the developers of Wine have announced a change that will likely be the final push gamers need to migrate from Windows to Linux. That change comes in the form of NTSYNC support. This new feature was introduced as a kernel driver in January 2026 and retools how Windows games synchronize threads on Linux.

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