Liberate Windows Programs With Wine

Jonni Bidwell can’t afford to buy Central Otago Pinot Noirs, but Wine at least enables him to run programs from the other side.

Linux is a perfectly adequate replacement for Windows. We’d go further and say it’s vastly superior, in almost every way.

Yet sometimes some people have just cause to run Windows applications. This might be because Karen from accounts has sent a Word document full of macros and tables and oddly named fonts that needs to be returned, along with accompanying TPS reports, by the end of the day. Some people want to play games not available on Linux, whether they’re classics from that have long been abandoned, or triple A releases that may never make it to the penguin side.

Many people have a dual-boot arrangement or a separate Windows machine altogether, but rebooting or moving to another room is a chore. Wine can also be useful helping people migrate to Linux, enabling them to use Windows tools until they get used to their Linux equivalents.

For nearly 25 years Wine has made it possible for Linux users to run Windows programs from their OS of choice. The results weren’t always pretty, but if you haven’t checked it out for a while you may be pleasantly surprised.

In the beginning there were just a handful of coders working on the project, but today hundreds of contributors (both volunteers and sponsored) contribute to this most unique of FLOSS projects. It’s rapid fortnightly release cycle means that bugs are squashed quickly, but also that your distro might have trouble keeping up. We’ll show you how to get the latest versions, or even try out some extra patches. And we’ll guide you through setting up DXVK, so you can leverage the power of Vulkan to play DirectX 11 games.