this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Steam Deck (or any Linux device) does not emulate Windows for games. A translation layer is much different.
I'm aware, but I'm not fully educated on the difference between the two.
It's like alien dogs — the creature is not a dog per se, it's not a canine, but you call it a dog (as a writer) so the reader understands it serves the same role, socially. I think there are a lot of colloquial terms like "dog" that get reused in science fiction where it's not that thing, but it's like that thing and that's what people understand.
So you can explain why WINE is not an emulator (that's actually what WINE stands for) but at the end of the day, it's a program that lets you run programs designed for another machine or operating system. It accomplishes the same goal for the end user as an emulator, even if it does so a little differently. I guess it's like Boomers calling Xbox and PlayStation "Nintendo." They're technically wrong, but they just see video games and go with the name they know.
Emulators have far more performance overhead compared to a compatibility/translation layer that WINE tries to accomplish. There can even be performance improvements overall due to the lack of additional Windows overhead.
This makes it different from say, DOSBox or PCEmu, since a machine with the same hardware specifications that the software was initially designed to run on can work well, or even exceed expectations. Emulators usually require much more power than the original core system.