# Wires

Creative practitioners shouldn’t have to accept surveillance or replace working computers to retain access to their tools. Leaving these systems shouldn’t require abandoning established workflows, years of experience, or accumulated projects. Wires makes that change practical through an open-source runtime and installers for running Windows creative applications on Linux, beginning with Ableton Live and Max.

## Creative practice

Compatibility has to extend beyond an application opening. A working creative environment depends on audio, instruments and controllers, readable interfaces, and reliable interaction with the desktop. Built on Wine and other open-source work, Wires maintains these connections through application-specific investigation and integration. Its [published engineering](https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux) includes MIDI reconnection, Push hardware support, pointer gestures, and text rendering. Patch provenance credits the projects and contributors it builds on.

Maintainer testing reports faster application startup than Windows and operation on hardware with half the recommended Windows RAM. Community reports received by the maintainers include composers preparing live productions and developing commercial Max devices and instruments. These reports inform further work; compatibility still depends on the application version, hardware, and workflow.

## Research and engineering

Wires follows a sustained investigation into the costs of technological dependence. Cade Diehm’s [research on creative-tool infrastructure](https://newdesigncongress.org/en/note/2022/the-coming-game-engine-inflection-point/) examines the work required to leave proprietary systems. His and Benjamin Royer’s [preservation research for Webrecorder](https://newdesigncongress.org/en/report/2022/memory-in-uncertainty/) examines how software environments, interoperability, and maintenance determine whether work remains accessible. Wires puts that concern into practice by helping people retain existing creative tools while changing operating systems.

Published code and [scoped investigations](https://github.com/shibco/ableton-linux/blob/aceb236a81656c609274afbf27fd54eb5017e5e2/notes/ABLETON-WINE-MIDI-HOTPLUG.md) make fixes available for inspection and reuse. Keeping them maintainable requires records of their sources and authorship, tests that reproduce the failures, and checks against real applications and hardware. These records allow other developers to assess a change and continue the work.

## Individual contributions

Individual financial contributions pay for the work behind continued compatibility: diagnosing failures, checking the sources and authorship of changes, testing creative workflows and hardware, and maintaining installation tools. They fund support for more applications and ongoing research into keeping creative work usable when its original software environment is no longer supported.

Wires is a Para-Real Ltd. project maintained by [Cade Diehm](https://shiba.computer/about/), [Lucas Gillingham](https://github.com/ClickSentinel), and Sebastian Thümmel.

[Download the runtime](https://cdn.wires.sh/runtimes), [get an installer](https://cdn.wires.sh/install), or [contact us about an individual contribution](mailto:hello@parare.al?subject=Wires%20support).