On 02.07.24 02:57, George at Clug wrote:
I wanted to know "how to configure and use Wine to run a Windows program".
And that's why you should try out Bottles, because it's not just plain Wine. If you succeed with it, you can check the source code, what exactly they are doing that enables better success rates. E.g. they offer some sort of a desktop to run programs inside. In a few cases this helps solve some issues.
No specific programs in mind, but MS Office could be an example.
Afaik, this can only be possible with Crossover, my guess is they use some closed source components that allow to run even MS Office or Adobes Suite. But for everyone else, if you don't use dirt old versions of these programs, it's just impossible to run them as they are very stubborn about not to run on anything but Windows and macOS, no matter how hard you try. There are YouTube videos of people showing off that they succeed with this, but of course they never share how. So either these are just fake or they found a way to tell which dlls the programs are missing and just copied them from an existing Windows installation. Who knows. So you are better of trying apps that have an actual chance of ever being able to run on Linux. Maybe a good starting point is KeePass. Officially only supports Windows, but with explicit support for Mono, and Debian even has a package that sets up the Wine environment to run it inside.
As Mario pointed, one example would be to have a modern web browser with DRM.
DRM is already present in various browsers, just not necessarily the highest level. But question is if that can even be emulated. Because if it was that easy, there would be guides for that.
Many games are only released as Windows programs. Fortunately Steam has achieved amazing results for running Windows games in Linux.
True. That's what Proton is for, with a mix of DXVK and the sorts.
At this stage I am only testing the concept, to see what is possible, what works, and what does not work.
That's what Wine's AppDB is for: https://appdb.winehq.org/
To see what I need to understand so I can configure Wine for any given Windows application.
That's just a naive dream, and it's highly questionable if that will ever be possible, most likely not. There are just too many programs depending on bad design decisions of Windows, like allowing just any terribly written Kernel level driver to do whatever the hell it wants. Valve is only this successful with Proton because they e.g. hired Collabora to develop and upstream APIs for the Linux Kernel to handle system calls Linux doesn't and will never support. Better stick to what's known to be supported, unless you want to develop for Wine itself. If you want to run a program with it, most likely others have tried that already, so you don't need to start from scratch. And you don't need to waste your time with things that will never work.
