Windows 10 Creators Update

Here is an interesting development. This is not a link to piracy, just a discussion of it.

Pirates are now packaging Windows games using WINE and Flatpak for Linux, and making it a one-click operation. Now, I'm not encouraging that, but I do think piracy is interesting to observe in terms of user uptake. Obviously it would be much better if this were being done in a legit way, but it's telling that the pirates are already finding the utility in it. Piracy was certainly a major factor in the spread of Microsoft software.

Virtualization is the (near) future especially now when AMD shaken the CPU market with cheap hexacores and tossing dualcore architecture still pushed by Intel down the drain.

Not sure about this wine/flatpak thing though. For all I remember pirated software was usually packed as iso file, a format windows10 can open by itself without using any 3rd party util. Maybe iso's compression is not as good as wine/flatpak?
But you raise a good question. If it's superior to another installation processes by some means, shouldn't developers widely adopt it instead of classic setup.exe or setup.msi?

No, it's not for Windows itself. WINE is a tool that allows Windows software to run on Linux without virtualization. It works very well for many programs and games, but it is complex to set up, and not friendly for the casual user. The idea here is that the pirates have done all the correct WINE configuration upfront, and packed the complete setups as Flatpaks. Then, to the end user, the presence of WINE becomes irrelevant - they just click on the Flatpak installation in Linux, and then run the game.

It's nto that complex:

wine windows.exe

Originally Posted by Ripper
No, it's not for Windows itself. WINE is a tool that allows Windows software to run on Linux without virtualization. It works very well for many programs and games, but it is complex to set up, and not friendly for the casual user. The idea here is that the pirates have done all the correct WINE configuration upfront, and packed the complete setups as Flatpaks. Then, to the end user, the presence of WINE becomes irrelevant - they just click on the Flatpak installation in Linux, and then run the game.

GOG already bundles old games for DOSBOX. Not much setup required. Doing the same for Windows/Cross-platform games would be nice too I guess.