What exactly does that mean? To make this easier, let’s walk through the process of installing Wine and then installing and running a Windows application with the tool. In fact, the developers of Wine have gone out of their way to make the compatibility layer as user-friendly as possible. You might think, because of the complexity of bringing such a tool to life, that Wine would be complicated to install and use. Granted most of the Wine work is focused on games, but you’ll still find a healthy list of productivity apps available. To date there are thousands of fully supported applications that now run on Wine (check out the application database for a full list) and that list is ever growing. Over time more and more applications were supported until Wine became a must-have tool for many users and businesses (and especially Linux gamers).

If you wanted Notepad, Calculator, or Solitaire…you were good to go.īut then something interesting happened.

It wasn’t perfect, and the supported apps were limited. The name is now simply Wine.Įffectively, what Wine did was to allow Windows applications to run on the Linux platform. The name originally stood for Wine Is Not an Emulator (because everyone mistook the tool for a Windows emulator). To overcome this weakness, a compatibility layer called WINE was created. This issue was especially critical in the world of business ─ where Windows desktop applications could make or break productivity. Back in the mid 90s and early 00s, Linux, being a fledgling operating system, suffered from a severe lack of useful applications.

Notepad++ linux mint