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Comment by Dayshine | Hacker News Reader

Does Wine still require the complicated, hard to manage, and poorly documented use of various combinations of WINEPREFIX, Winetricks and WINEARCH?

It always seemed to me the easiest thing was to spin up a new VM for every application I wanted to run in Wine.

I feel like that isn't the intention, but without any built-in profile management you're always one typo away from wrecking your entire Wine setup.

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I surely hope so, given that these make it possible to do things with Wine which are difficult if not impossible with a real Windows installation without having to do silly things with VMs or containers. As an example I use Wine to run Sketchup (2016, off-line) on Linux. After 30 days the thing times out and wants me to buy a license which is no longer available given that Sketchup has gone with the times and now does cloudy things. Since I just want to run the thing off-line without any external interference I prefer the 2016 version over newer incarnations. On Windows I'd have to try to eradicate every last trace of Sketchup from the registry and any other location used to determine whether this is the first time the program has been installed. On Linux the solution is simple, just wipe $WINEPREFIX and re-install (an automated process) to the same location. A simple script does the job, sketchup -r and I'm set.

By the way, $WINEPREFIX can also be used to make sure you don't wreck your entire Wine setup with a single typo. Just make sure all your serious use of Wine is done with a specific, non-default prefix and you're set.

There's applications to do this on Windows too. Using Sandboxie you can create a sandbox on the file system to isolate files (for sketchup for example) in the same way you can use a Wine prefix to isolate a single application.

Of course this doesn't cover all uses, but in my experience Windows tools exist to provide most features you can use Wine for. The difference is having to download 20 apps for 20 things and writing 20 scripts to automate everything versus downloading wine and just writing 20 scripts.

It bears mention that sandboxie is now free and transitioning to open source. So hopefully the original poster doesn't also have to uninstall and reinstall it due to cloudy things.

"now does cloudy things" has really made my day, thanks. Unfortunately, a lot of modern software does cloudy things, Windows 10 and MS Office included.

I love IntelliJ approach to these cloudy things. They know developers are smart enough to remove whatever smart thing they can come up with, so instead, they do the obvious and kindly step back.

I apologize for removing their registry entry on Windows for Rider and I promise I will pay for the product when I am financially confident enough to do so. :)

Use PlayOnLinux as a GUI for managing different prefixes but don't use the built-in install scripts , there are GUI configs but you can also open with a button a terminal in the correct prefix and type commands there if needed.

You may still need prefixes because for game A the wine direct3d will work better but for game B you may want DXVK and if you want to mod Skyrim you will have to compile a patched wine version,

POL will also manage all versions of wine for you so it can grab the latest one if you need it or some very old one if some game/application needs that.

I read about a month ago about hat the dev of DXVK had tons of issues where small patches to fix X issue were breaking Y issue and it made no sense, so is a impossible job to be 100% compatible with all games and application bugs.

I don't understand what is so hard about WINEPREFIX and WINEARCH? Instead of a new VM, just use a new wineprefix for each application. Wintetricks works in your prefix, it doesn't take any special setup.

For games i use Lutis (https://lutris.net/) which gives you something similar to "profiles" (they call it runners, pre-configured isolated WINE instances) for each application. Also it includes a bunch of tricks and helpers out of the box.

I actually have better mileage without lutris - not sure why.

I think is because when you setup the things yourself you understand what you are doing.

I think actually for some reason lutris binaries don't work that well with fedora or something - but hard to tell.

You can use pywinery for (more lightweight) profile management

https://github.com/ergoithz/pywinery

Projects like Lutris, PlayOnLinux, Steam (Proton) solve that problem.

PlayOnLinux is your Friend

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