Wine has been very useful for a few decades now. I got to admit though, I seldom find myself running serious software with it. I end up with Windows itself running in a virtual machine. I remember that it actually ran my VB6 applications like Whois Web (https://rietta.com/whoisweb) and RoboGen (https://rietta.com/robogen) very, very well twenty years ago!

It strikes me as a bit odd that Wine 9.0 is getting a bugfix release, when latest Wine is on 10.6. There must be some specific software that breaks with 10.

Since Valve joined the game, the development of WINE has improved significantly. While it was decent before, the limited user base meant many rarely used APIs or parameters only had stubs. Steam's involvement hasn't just enhanced graphics and audio support, many APIs have also been implemented to support some weird games.

At least I can now run the ancient programs I wrote in the school, though I still have to implement some parameters and recompile WINE.