| Since last summer, I am working on a yet another Wine prefix manager, called Wine Bar [1]. My main motivation was to have a user-friendly and opensource tool that can run (some) Windows apps on my Macbook Air M2 running Linux. Before you ask, it supports regular x86_64 Linux as well. Besides, I wasn't entirely happy with the existing Wine launchers, namely Lutris / Heroic / Bottles (none of which support Linux on Apple hardware, although I was able to run an old version of Heroic under muvm). I wanted more control. For instance, sometimes I need to install a Windows component using winetricks before an installer for some Windows app would agree to run. I also wanted even more user-friendliness. I didn't want to manually specify the executable in the installation folder to run. I wanted the executable to automatically appear on a "Desktop" in the UI as a result of running the installer for a Windows app. All of that I've achieved. Recently, I've put a very significant effort to make a Snap version of Wine Bar. An x86_64 Snap wouldn't be terribly difficult to make, but packaging an arm64 version as a Snap and making it work was really-really hard. That's because Linux on Apple hardware uses a non-4K hardware page size. So, running Windows apps in such an environment involves running a full-blown 4K-page Linux kernel inside a micro-VM. From within the VM, you register FEX-EMU as a binfmt-misc handler, and then finally you are able to run a Wine process or a wrapper around it (like Proton). Oh, in order for that to work, you also need to provide an x86_64 / x86 RootFS image for FEX-EMU. All those components need to be built as part of the Snap build process. Long story short, I succeeded and the Snap version of Wine Bar is available from the Snap Store, yet I am still waiting [2] (for over 2 weeks without any reaction) for a couple of permissions to be granted to it. That's not a showstopper though, as the permissions may be granted manually by the user. [1]: https://github.com/Tulon/WineBar [2]: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/autoconnect-requests-for-wineba... |