Wine (software)
| Wine | |
|---|---|
winecfg configures Wine | |
| Original authors | Bob Amstadt, Eric Youngdale |
| Developers | Wine authors (1,989) |
| Initial release | 4 July 1993 |
| Stable release | 11.0
/ 13 January 2026 |
| Preview release | 11.4
/ 7 March 2026 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | |
| Platform | IA-32, x86-64, ARM |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Type | Compatibility layer |
| License | LGPL 2.1 or later |
| Website | winehq.org |
| Repository | gitlab |
Wine 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. 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 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. This plurality was larger than all x86 virtualization programs combined, and larger than the 27.9% who reported not running Windows applications.