Wine (software)
Wine1 is a compatibility layer to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine is free and open-source software and is predominantly written using black-box testing reverse engineering, to avoid copyright issues.
Wine is primarily developed for Linux, macOS and FreeBSD.2 Developers can compile Windows applications against WineLib to help port them to Unix-like systems. No code emulation or virtualization occurs, except on Apple silicon Mac computers, where Rosetta 2 is used to translate x86_64 code to ARM code.
In a 2007 survey by desktoplinux.com of 38,500 Linux desktop users, 31.5% of respondents reported using Wine to run Windows applications.3 This plurality was larger than all x86 virtualization programs combined and larger than the 27.9% who reported not running Windows applications.4
Printed 2026-10-13.
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Footnotes
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Originally a recursive acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator” ↩
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“Download · Wiki · wine/wine · GitLab”. GitLab. Retrieved 5 November 2025. ↩
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“2007 Desktop Linux Market survey”. 21 August 2007. Retrieved 8 October 2007. ↩
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Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. (22 August 2007). “Running Windows applications on Linux”. 2007 Desktop Linux Survey results. DesktopLinux. Archived from the original on 11 February 2010. ↩