I'm just trying to build up a picture in my head of whether there will come a day when Wine users can pick an app designed for a previous generation of Windows and expect it to work flawlessly (ignoring things that try to manipulate the hardware directly, I suppose)? Or will there always be incompatibilities?
There will (likely) always be incompatibilities. Wine development has always been driven by app compatibility - someone picks an app and tries to run it, and tries to fix problems they come across. We don't aim for feature completeness - Windows is far, far too big to replicate with the resources we have. So, some apps (the ones developers have worked on, and likely others) will work quite well, while others (those that haven't been worked on) may not work as well.
--Juan
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