Wine is an awesome piece of software to run Windows software on Linux and Mac natively.
It supports a wide range of software and windows libraries including Steam and GOG.com games.
It is mostly used for playing Windows games on Linux and using adobe software such as photoshop on Linux.
Wine supports almost every Linux distribution and can outperform any emulator.
The wine itself is not an emulator. Wine is a Windows compatibility layer for Linux and Mac.
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You can find a list of Windows software that has been tested to run on Linux using wine here.
If certain software is not listed then this does not mean the software won’t run on Wine. You can install the software without much trouble.
There are certain tools and tweaks available for Wine to install DirectX, Visual C++, and other necessary libraries for certain software.
It can process audio, video, and 3d graphics just like in Windows. If you encounter a bug or want to check current known bugs, then you can check it here.
Note: Make a Timeshift backup, in case something goes wrong, you can revert the changes using your backup.
Install Wine on Linux Mint 21
Step 1: Open Terminal by clicking on it from the menu or pressing Ctrl+Alt+T.
Step 2: Enter the command “sudo dpkg –add-architecture i386” in the terminal without quotes.
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This will enable 36-bit architecture on the system. It is necessary to enable support for all Windows applications as some of them run on 32-bit architecture instead of 64-bit.
Step 3: Now enter “wget -O – https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key | sudo apt-key add –” in the terminal and press enter.
This will download and add Wine’s key to our system so that we can safely install Wine. Without this, Wine will be marked untrusted and hence we will not be able to continue our installation.
Step 4: Input ” sudo add-apt-repository ‘deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ focal main’ ” in the terminal.
This will add the Wine repository to our system so we can download and install Wine using apt.
Step 5: Enter “Sudo apt update” in the terminal.
This will update all the repositories and will download the latest list of applications from all the known repositories.
Step 6: Enter “sudo apt install –install-recommends winehq-stable” in the terminal to begin the installation of Wine.
This will take some time as apt will now download and install wine which is over 300 M.B of data.
Step 7: Enter Yes in the terminal to continue the installation.
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It will now ask you to verify if you are okay with the necessary dependencies, and that it will download automatically during the installation. Enter Yes/Y to continue or enter No/N to abort the installation.
The installation will take some time depending on your internet speed.
Step 8: Once the installation is complete, type “winecfg” in the terminal to open the wine configuration menu.
This will open up the wine configuration panel, from where you can configure wine and make it behave the way you want it to.
Configure Wine to run Windows applications on Linux
If this is your first time installing Wine on this system, then it will ask you to install wine-mono package which is necessary to run applications.
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Click Install to download and install the mono package for wine.
The configuration menu may appear while downloading the Mono package. You can play with it or can close it by pressing OK or Cancel.
Once the installation of Mono is complete, it will now ask you to install Wine Gecko. Gecko is a necessary package needed for applications with embedded HTML to work properly.
Install it by clicking the Install button.
After all the required packages are installed, enter the command below to check the wine version and if it is properly installed.
wine --version
If it gives an output similar to the one shown in the picture above, then you are ready to use Wine on Linux Mint 21.
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You can install windows applications by directly clicking them or install third-party applications to manage wine such as CrossOver(Paid) or q4wine(free)
Conclusion
Wine can be used to run Windows software and games on Linux natively without dual booting windows with Linux or without using an emulator.
All the commands that I mentioned above:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
wget -O - https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ focal main'
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable
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