Linux Mint's new way of dealing with Wine out-of-the-box

[Marlock]

The Linux Mint Blog - Monthly News - May 2019
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3751

Wine 4

One of the ongoing issues associated with the new 18.04 package base in Linux Mint 19.x was the fact that Wine was tedious to install and that it didn’t work well out of the box.

We looked into it and identified the following problems:

• Both wine-stable and wine-development were obsolete
  
• On a 64-bit machine, installing wine led to an incomplete set of packages, with no support for 32-bit Windows binaries
  
• Windows binaries (.exe, .msi..etc) could only be run from the command line
  
• Regedit, Wine Setup, C:\ Drive and the various shortcuts usually found in the menu after installing Wine were missing

It turned out the first three issues were specific to the package base and weren’t present upstream in the packages provided by WineHQ.

To tackle these, the stable version of Wine from WineHQ, version 4, was backported into the Linux Mint repositories. On top of addressing these problems, it also introduces support for Vulkan, game controllers and Direct3D 12.

The last issue is unfortunately global and it affects all modern versions of Wine. To address it, a new package called wine-desktop-files was created and added to our repositories.

Last but not least, a new metapackage called wine-installer was created to make the installation of Wine in Linux Mint 19.x easier (there are unfortunately name conflicts between Ubuntu and WineHQ which led to WineHQ conflicting with the “wine” meta name).

The release notes were updated to document how to install Wine 4 and how to upgrade to it if you’re already running version 3.

To me it looks like one of those tiny things that LM does that are utterly irrelevant (but harmless) to linux-savvy users, but may improve the experience of new users.

Plus it may serve as an experiment to get to be treated Wine in a similar way as Canonical treats Firefox updates on Ubuntu (updated asap instead of frozen until next distro version upgrade with new package base)...

Given how fast Wine is evolving and how it has become generally more stable than the old repos versions (LM 19 is based on Ubuntu 18.04 which only has Wine 3.0.x on the repo!!!) it should be beneficial. Also there is still separate wine_stable and wine-development packages so people who need stability can have it just fine.

No mention of wine-staging though... maybe in the future it gets picked up as well... one can hope ;)


What do you folks think about it?

[Cat on Linux]

if they have manpower to package and upkeep that, why not? anything that brings easy installing for mainstream user is good. and LM is mainstream distro after all

[Marlock]

More info (and for how it works for wine-staging too):
https://linuxmint.com/rel_tessa_cinnamon.php

Wine 4.0
To install the stable version of WINE from WineHQ, open a terminal and type:

apt install --install-recommends wine-installer

Among other things, this will install wine-desktop-files, which adds menu entries for regedit, your C:\ drive and other items which are missing from upstream WINE.

You can also follow the instructions from WineHQ, install either the stable, staging or devel version of WINE and make sure to have wine-desktop-files installed.

Upgrading Wine to version 4
If you installed wine-stable 3.0 or wine-development 3.0 before wine 4.0 was added to the repositories, apply the updates to bring it up to version 4.0 and run the following command to install the missing packages:

apt install --install-recommends wine-installer

To clean up, run the following command to list all wine 3.0 packages:

dpkg -l | grep wine | grep "3\."

These packages can be removed.

You can also reinstall PlayOnLinux if it was removed during the update.