Since you are here, I will assume that you are a Linux user. And from time to time you wonder: can I run windows applications on Linux?
The answer is yes, you can run Windows applications on Linux. Here are some ways to run Windows programs on Linux:
- Installing Windows on a separate partition of your hard drive
- Installing Windows as a virtual machine on Linux
Both of these work just fine. But they are a bit demanding on resources.
If you only need to use a small Windows application, installing Windows on a separate hard drive partition or as a virtual machine is inefficient. What’s more, a virtual machine can’t use all the power of your machine. So, what’s the solution?
Don’t worry, there is another way to use the Windows software on Linux. It’s called Wine. If you are not yet familiar with it or if you are new to the Linux world this article is for you.
In this beginner’s guide I will show you what Wine is and how to use it to run Windows software on Linux. I have used Ubuntu here because Ubuntu is one of the best Linux distributions for beginners, but any other Linux distribution will have more or less the same steps (except for commands in Arch or Fedora based distributions).
Using Wine to run Windows programs on Linux
Wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. And WINE is actually an acronym for this word. And, as mentioned before, it’s not even a virtual machine.
Rather, it is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on UNIX-like or POSIX-compatible operating systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, BSD). While a virtual machine or emulator mimics the internal logic of Windows, Wine translates that Windows logic into native UNIX/POSIX-compatible logic.
In simple and non-technical terms, Wine converts internal Windows commands into commands that your Linux system can understand as native.
Installing Wine
There are different ways to install Wine on your system. Since this is a beginner’s guide, I will describe the simplest of them all.
Almost all Linux distributions come with Wine in a package repository. More often than not, the latest stable version of Wine is available in the package repository. Installing Wine on Ubuntu is as simple as opening a terminal and running the following commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install wine
However, if you’re using a 64-bit installation of Ubuntu, you’ll need to run these additional commands:
sudo dpkg –add-architecture i386
This will add 32-bit architecture support to your distribution, which will help you when installing certain software.