Softwarelinuxwindowswineopen source
Bottles creator Mirko Brombin's Raven plays the Windows kernel on Linux, so Windows installers run as they are
Raven runs a Windows program's own code on the CPU in a sandbox and answers every system call itself: processes, files, the registry, windows and input. Notepad++ passes its full test, on day-one software its maker won't call an alpha.
The pitch on the repo fits in one line: “A Windows your apps recognize.” You download the same installer you’d run on a PC, run it, and the program starts. “No virtual machine, no winetricks, no DLL overrides,” the README says.
Brombin spells out the trick. “The program’s code runs directly on your CPU, inside a sandbox where it cannot reach Linux,” Brombin writes. Every call that code makes to the system goes to Raven, “which plays the part of the Windows kernel and its services: processes and threads, files, the registry, windows and input.” Graphics land on Wayland and Vulkan, with DXVK and vkd3d-proton handling Direct3D.
The detail that tells you who built it: “Raven’s own system libraries stay in charge even when an installer writes its own kernel32 or user32.” The redistributables an installer brings along still load. Anyone who has watched one app’s installer drop a DLL into a shared Wine prefix and break a second app knows exactly which headache that line is aimed at.
The scorecard is honest about how early this is. Notepad++ 8.7.1 scores 100%, through a workflow that “saves a file, closes and reopens it, appends to it, uses the clipboard and switches theme.” 7-Zip, Audacity, ClassiCube and Minesweeper sit at 75%. KeePass gets 50%, because it wants .NET Framework 4.8 and a fresh prefix doesn’t have it. VLC scores 25%.
The speed numbers are Raven’s own, from one machine, an Intel Core i7-13700H. ClassiCube 1.3.8 ran at a median 71.5 frames per second under Raven, against 63.0 for both Wine 11.0 and Soda. Every graphics test used lavapipe, Mesa’s software Vulkan, a choice the README defends: “Software Vulkan keeps the numbers reproducible anywhere; a hardware GPU raises them for every runtime.” On the project site, a program that exits at once is timed at 0.04 seconds under Raven and 3.70 under Wine.
Brombin’s own read: “I don’t even feel like calling it an alpha.” He has tried Chrome and Steam, and is leaving Microsoft Office alone for now, since he’s already fighting it in Soda.
The current code is C++, with Skia for drawing and libwayland. It began in Go, talking to the Wayland compositor over a raw socket with no library at all. “Yes, I regret it today,” he writes. He also credits AI for making the C++ port “less painful than it would have been otherwise.”
One more thing to check before you package it: the README licenses Raven’s Linux runtime under GPL-3.0-or-later, with its guest adapters still MIT and “Earlier MIT grants remain valid,” while the site’s footer still says “Raven code: MIT.”
Brombin has opened an issue for benchmark results from other people’s hardware. Those numbers, on real GPUs and machines that aren’t his, will show whether a kernel impersonator on Linux beats Wine on a hardware GPU too.