Rui CarmoWINE Is Not an Emulator.
It’s an application loader and a set of runtimes that allow you to run COFF Windows binaries in Linux (or other Intel-based UNIX variants, but with lesser success), without performing any CPU emulation.
What it “emulates” is the runtime environment for Windows applications by mapping Windows system calls to its own. So, no, it’s definitely not a mere emulator.
There are a few useful pre-packaged WINE runtimes for various platforms that make it trivial to run some applications without the overhead of a virtual machine:
On macOS, Darwine carried the early effort to port WINE to PowerPC and later Intel Macs.
Resources
| Category | Date | Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Android | 2024 | MiceWine | a customized build of Wine compiled for Android bundled with Box64 |
| Linux | 2024 | Bottles | a modern front-end |
| Tools | 2025 | winapps | a tool that allows running Windows applications seamlessly on GNU/Linux systems via RDP. |
| macOS | 2023 | Whisky | a modern front-end for Wine |
| 2018 | Winebottler | an old favorite | |
| Wineskin | creates neat packages with everything you need, including a minimal self-contained X11 runtime | ||
| PlayOnMac | heavily oriented towards gaming |