You still need to run the exe through raven. Though you can do that (and it’s also possible with wine already) by having the runner assotiated with exe files in your file browser. Normally with wine it’s already the case that you can double click on the exe from there and have it launch.

When they say “run directly in the CPU” what they mean is that it’s not a VM… but this was already true of wine too.

My understanding is that they are replacing the windows kernel (with help of ReactOS code) and asking you to install official Microsoft libraries into a separate runtime environment… so it’s similar to a VM in the sense that it’s running a different kernel with its own runtime, but at the same time not a VM because it’s not emulating the hardware level… it’s a lower level than wine but a higher level than a VM.

I feel this can potentially be more of a moving target (since it depends on Microsoft not changing the lower level ABI used in future versions of the libraries) and less legally-safe (you need to agree to MS terms when you install their libraries… at any time they can change them and say you cannot do this).

Wine instead implements higher level APIs, which MS is incentivized to keep stable, since changes at that level would also break compatibility with programs (and in some cases, Wine’s API is actually more compatible with Windows software than modern versions of Windows that have dropped older APIs).

Plus… it necessarily relies in closed source software (the MS libraries) to run… so I’d argue it’s less free than wine.