As I mentioned in the last post I’m making extensive use of Wine and its gamer sibling Proton to run games and software on my kids laptops, and honestly even more so my own laptop. I though I’d go into detail on how and why I’m doing that.
For most Linux users Wine is nothing new, its basically an essential tool whenever you’ve got to run an application that is only available for Windows. Wine emulates the API (Application Programming Interface) of various versions of the Windows operating system. The upshot of this is that it uses resources on the Linux system to provide this interface to an application designed to run on Windows so you can use that same software on Linux (Or BSD, or OSX, or whatever).
Is it perfect? No, there is some software that requires access to windows features or internals the Wine software doesn’t, or just can’t emulate, but for the majority of applications It works just fine.
On fedora sudo dnf install wine wine.i686 winetricks will install the 32bit and 64bit versions of wine and the winetricks tool wich is useful for management later. I’d also reccomend installing winegui to manage your wine prefixes. Rather than installing all your windows software in a single default prefix I like to create individual prefixes for larger apps, or collections of apps, in order to keep things neat and tidy. No matter how cluttered a given prefix gets, its easy to just whipe it out if its only hosting a single application. Additionally you can specifiy which version of MS windows to emulate, and wether or not to support Mono and Gecko which many older apps just don’t need.
Wine and Proton have actually gotten so good I don’t really notice the performance hit I used to see while running applications under wine. I often find that running the Windows versions of games thru Steam with Proton works better than running the Linux versions provided. I think a big part of this is that these Linux ports exist on a spectrum of targeted distributions and versions.
As an example, on the kids Thinkpad X390’s I am currently running VILEBox on wine. VILEBox is a compilation of the early DOS and Win 3.1 Carmen Sandiego games installed in a bundle that runs on top of the windows port of DOSBox using lots of carefully constructed config files. It is possible to extract the archive and use these same scripts on your own install of DOSBox, but its proven a little bit of a hassel for me (If I ever take the time I’ll likely document it here) so I just run it on wine. I created a “machine” in WineGUI targeting a 64bit copy of Windows 10 and installed the complete collection into that. When I run it these vintage games are running on top of a Windows copy of DOSBox, on top of wine, and they work just fine. They run great.
Additionally, on my own Thinkpad T490s I’m running AppleWin on Wine, again, just fine. I was having trouble getting the Linux port LinApple to support a hard drive image I wanted to run, so I installed AppleWin and it works great, it can even see my cheap knockoff wired XBOX controller plugged in.
If you are on the fence about running Linux specifically because you have Windows apps you need or want to run, Wine has probably got you covered. Unless its Minecraft Bedrock edition, that doesn’t work on wine, although there is experimental support for the Android version via emulation.
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