If Wine completely replaces MS Windows, will it duplicate all of the functions of MS Windows?

Wine's goal is to make it possible to run Windows applications on Unix. To this end it will provide replacements for just those DLLs and APIs that are needed by these Windows applications. This means that Wine will not provide replacements for DLLs that are not shipped with Windows or are always shipped with Windows application (e.g. the Visual Basic run time). This also means that implementing an API that no application ever uses is not a priority. Similarly, until there are applications out there that use the Win64 API, it will not be a priority. That being said, we will certainly try to keep our options open and to improve our API coverage as we can. Also Wine is not an operating system, so that writing device drivers is not part of Wine's goals. However if you are interested in device drivers, the Linux, FreeBSD and ReactOS kernel developers would certainly appreciate your contribution. Similarly Wine does not try to be a desktop environment so providing applets such as a ...  more