Wine (software)

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_64 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.