EKekianjo·Nov 17, 2022Submission
New Release of Box86/Box64, with Better Compatibility of x86 x86_64 Games on ARM
2 points · Open discussionptitSeb
box86
C2019–2023
ptitSeb / box86
box86
Box86 - Linux Userspace x86 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM Linux devices
18Distinct people
21Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
3.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Box86 - Linux Userspace x86 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM Linux devices
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
It definitely isn't. I've been a huge linux nerd since my preteens in the late 2000s, I jumped on to squeeze more performance out of the thoroughly mediocre hardware I had…
spijdar used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:05:26 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year21 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-09-14 22:20:45 UTC to 2023-09-13 20:27:29 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesYou can already do x86 emulation on linux ARM devices via other means[0] including on the Raspberry Pi. Keep in mind performance will be greatly degraded, but its possible.
[0]https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
In Quick Look at Rosetta on LinuxIt definitely isn't. I've been a huge linux nerd since my preteens in the late 2000s, I jumped on to squeeze more performance out of the thoroughly mediocre hardware I had access to. I wanted to program, and I found Visual Studio to be incomprehensibly dense and confusing, while Linux tools were so much simpler, with GCC, GEdit, makefiles and the like being more to my liking. I fell deep into the rabbit hole, learned emacs, then vim (it was more responsive on my intel atom-powered netbook), became a "shell guru", eventually went to college at 16 and started doing cybersecurity work/pentesting professionally. I've even made a tiny contribution to the Linux kernel, which I'm pretty proud of.
All this anecdata to say, I consider myself pretty okay at using Linux, I "prefer" Linux, but I don't use Linux for gaming. Not unless it makes sense.
Read the rest
I play Minecraft on Linux, and FOSS games that were developed on Linux. There's a POWER9 desktop on my desk that runs Linux, and all my professional and hobby work goes there. I love it.
But any commercial games? They go on my old college-days Intel desktop, running Win10. I can do the work to get games running on Linux, but why bother? Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger and strace and crap to do more $DAYJOB work.
Not to say I never do that for fun. I do. I've done some work with https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86, and that involves a similar process. But I just frankly don't find doing it to your average Steam game to be very fun. Sometimes the muse strikes, usually it doesn't.
And for your average Linux user, much less your average computer user overall, you can forget about it. IMO, unless you have a strong ideological reason to only use FOSS OSes (and all the power to you!), the reason you use Linux is because it's a vastly superior tool for certain problems.
Playing your average commercial game is not one of them.