For games use proton
In case you dont know its a fork of wine designed specifically for games.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Surprisingly good in most cases. Main thing missing for me is support for programs directly talking to USB devices (understandably, the associated driver support is its own can of worms).
that case is the one time I reach for a VM now for configuring peripherals. luckily they don't need separate software to be running to work properly
programs
Consider being more explicit about what you want/need. Some programs work great with wine and others have never.
Avoid. It's mostly games that work well. Use open source alternatives instead.
There is a crossover between the two, for example the Mass Effect Mod Manager and things like that, which work adequately.
Wine works well for most small GUI applications, the biggest issues are with the huge corporate, commercial programs like MS Office, CAD software and Adobe crapware, for which there are ways to get them to work, but you'd be better of migrating to a native alternative.
C# apps are always a pain though. Mono is rarely enough and as soon as you need MS dotnet libraries, everything is going to be a lot more painful.
OT: At my previous job I ran a Windows-exclusive compiler toolchain (Keil C51) with wine in a Makefile, which was a huge improvement to developer workflow compared to everyone having to use the bundled IDE, especially due to the parallel builds. Wine is awesome.
Seamless. Until you find something that isn't. Report it if so.
Most stuff that runs on Windows is uninteresting because there are superior free alternatives on Linux, but in the cases where I needed it, Bottles is great.
I'm not sure what people are referring to in other comments when they say Bottles has "jank", but for me it works very nicely for the few apps I occasionally need to use it for: Daz3D (just worked), jDownloader (just worked), and Affinity (followed this guide and it worked easily).
To be honest, my Ableton Live works like a charm with wine. But a lot of other Windows-only software does not. It depends. I am just lucky all I need does.
It's the plugins that cause me grief. Especially any that use ilok or weird licensing software.
Wow interesting, never heard Live is running well. Which version do you use on which distribution?
Ableton Live 10. Runs just as smooth as on my old windows. Im on OpenSUSE TumbleweedOS
Bottles only recently had a small update to make it less janky. Their team is working on a complete overhaul, Bottles Next.
To be honest, I've yet to find a program that doesn't have a flatpack equivalent (eg OnlyOffice for Microsoft Word) or flatpack version (eg Firefox). But just in case, I have WineCharm installed (Wine GUI)
In my experience it’s about the same as it was a few years ago. I think most of the effort has gone into gaming. What do you need to run? It might work great already.
Bottles is very hit or miss for me, extremely jank. When it works it's awesome though.
Wine usually just works in my experience.
But I don't use most of the common problem programs, like adobe products or whatever. It may be better to ask specifically about what programs you're concerned about compatibility with.
I was able to run Apple AirPort Utility for managing my Apple AirPort Extreme router. It has no web interface, but an app for all Apple platforms, and Windows too. The Utility for Windows is slightly better than macOS or iOS (in my opinion). It works well, and I’m happy that by migrating to Linux I’m still able to manage my router. There’s no more routers from Apple, and there’s no more updates to the app either, so I’m happy it’d stay that way. Perhaps I needed some tiny tuning to run the app, I won’t recall now.
I have the article about it in my not deployed yet blog, so I’d link it, but I need to deploy it first. (Would take me some time.) I have more details there. But overall, it was good.
Also, I was able to run Pro100 software for 3D modelling of furniture for my friend. It was working well, I did that with Bottles since his Fedora installation was atomic (Silverblue). It was okay, almost as good as on Windows, with some tiny nuances.
I’m happy to see others telling about their apps they were successfully launching and working with. Personally, I’m very interested in the graphical stack (like Adobe or Affinity apps), but I haven’t tried them yet. I’ve seen someone has success of installing modern Photoshop, but no more than that.