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by foresto 144 days ago
You might consider Flatpak packaging.

Flathub offers the org.winehq.Wine package, which you can use in the base and base-version fields of your own package's manifest. It wouldn't cause your code to be statically linked with Wine. Your package could then be distributed from your own flatpak remote.

There was an announcement about a year ago of an effort to make a paid flatpak market, apparently to be called Flathub LLC. I don't know if that effort is still active.

https://discourse.flathub.org/t/request-for-proposals-flathu...

Winelib might also be worth considering, depending on how you are able to navigate the relevant licenses.

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Winelib-User's-G...

I think Qt would yield better results than Wine for most things. Since your comment suggests that you're making proprietary software, you would have to take special care with linking or else submit to the Qt Group's commercial license terms.

3 comments

Too lazy to dig up the PRs, but Flathub doesn't merge Windows applications using the Wine runtime unless the submitter is also the upstream maintainer. They don't mention this requirement anywhere on the docs, they'll only tell you after you've spent 12 hours getting it to work.
It sounds like in this case the submitter would indeed also be the upstream maintainer.

In any case, it's possible to install Flatpaks without Flathub (by distributing a single .flatpak file to be installed with 'flatpak install --user something.flatpak'), though this is obviously not as convenient. Would be interesting to see an alternative Flatpak repository specifically for Flatpak'd Windows apps.

Most people can use the LGPL version of Qt.
"People" or "professionals"? Our legal department said we had to buy licenses.
Both. LGPL doesn't distinguish between commercial and non-commercial use.
Sure, but there's a clear practical difference. Most professionals don't have the agency or company backing to allow LGPL, with their companies source code. Most personal users do.
Flatpak can be pretty buggy with Wine I've had some programs misbehave cause it to eat up all my ram when using bottles for instance.