Bottles creator Mirko Brombin shows Raven, a way to run Windows programs on Linux without Wine

Raven runs a Windows program's code in a supervised process and answers its system calls from a runtime outside it. It is MIT licensed, very early, and its first benchmarks used software rendering...

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Mirko Brombin, who started the Wine prefix manager Bottles in 2017, has announced a new project called Raven. It runs Windows programs on Linux, and it does not use Wine to do it. The announcement post is dated 23 October 2026, and the source code is on GitHub under the MIT licence.

Brombin is clear that this is early work. He writes that Raven "is still in active development, it's in its early days", and he does not want to call it an alpha yet.

How it works

Raven splits a Windows program from the system it expects to talk to. In Brombin's words, it works by "running its code on the CPU, in a supervised process, and keeping the runtime that answers its requests outside it." The program's own instructions run directly, and when it asks Windows for something, Raven's runtime answers from the outside.

The current code is written in C++, with Skia for drawing and libwayland for windows. An earlier prototype was written in Go. Brombin says he did not use Wine as his main reference. He credits ReactOS, the long-running project to rebuild a Windows-compatible operating system, and says some parts of Raven are inspired by it while others are imported directly, with their licences and credits kept.

To run something you need Raven, its dependencies and a Windows executable, plus a Wayland session for anything with a window. "You don't need a Windows licence for Raven, or a partition or a VM," the post says. Raven does not copy files from a Windows install.

What it has run so far

The first graphical program Brombin got working was Notepad++, to the point where he could open it and write documents. He then picked Google Chrome and Steam as harder targets, calling them "applications that touch a huge number of aspects of the operating system". The post does not say how far either of those gets yet. Microsoft Office is left out for now.

The first numbers

The post compares Raven against Wine 11.0 and Soda 11.0-32-experimental on the same machine, an Intel Core i7-13700H running Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS. The one game figure given as text is for ClassiCube, the open source Minecraft Classic client: a median of 71.5 frames per second under Raven, against 63 for both Wine and Soda. Other charts cover command line run times, how long windows take to appear and a Direct3D 11 test.

There is a big caveat, and Brombin states it himself: "All the graphical tests used software rendering: these results don't describe performance with a hardware GPU." The tests ran on Mesa's lavapipe software renderer in a headless compositor, so they say little about how a game would run on a real graphics card. He calls the results preliminary.

Bottles is not going away. The post thanks the Bottles community for keeping that project going for over nine years.

Brombin has put a Python test suite in the repository and asks people to run it and post their results, with their OS, CPU, GPU and driver versions, in an issue on the GitHub project. The repository was created on 24 October and had just under 300 stars on 25 October.

Sources

Image: Image: Raven

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