> A VM with a stripped-bare Windows 10 install is likely to be more compatible with weird anti-cheat and DRM than anything Wine-based. Unless they intentionally add sniffing for it.
Performance under Wine would be far better than virtualizing the entire OS, and most anti-cheat systems do prevent playing in a VM as their virtual device drivers are a ripe target for abuse.
Performance might be better, but compatibility is likely to be worse.
In that regard, I'm worried that emulation-based compatibility is much more likely to be an ad-hoc crowd-sourced thing-- how many titles work fine for the first 1-5-10-15 hours, then you hit that one time it uses an unsupported API call? If I rely on some crowd-sourced database that says "platinum compatibility", what's my recourse then?
I guess I'm picturing my experience with FF7 on Windows back in the early 2000s, where it played fine until the middle of the 2nd or 3rd disc and then had a showstopping crash; soured my experience on it for years until I got the late-2010s rerelease which could make it to completion.
Performance under Wine would be far better than virtualizing the entire OS, and most anti-cheat systems do prevent playing in a VM as their virtual device drivers are a ripe target for abuse.