Last Updated on April 19, 2021
Wine
Wine is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow computer programs developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems including Linux.
Wine is an incredibly complicated piece of software. For quite a few years, Wine could just about run only very simple apps like the Windows calculator. But it’s seen slow but steady development over the years, and it can run fairly complex Windows software.
On Manjaro, we install Wine with the command:
$ sudo pacman -S wine
The project maintains lists of software that have ‘Gold’ and ‘Silver’ compatibility many of which are games. We didn’t test any games under Wine, as the Lenovo’s integrated graphics combined with Wine’s compatibility layer is not going to be very rewarding. Neither did we test any open source programs which run under Linux natively.
Instead, we tested a dozen or so useful freeware Windows utilities most of which aren’t available for Linux. Each application is installed in the usual way under Windows. Menu entries are automatically added to Manjaro’s desktop.
Programs that worked well include foobar2000, Irfranview (both shown below), HeidiSQL, Notepad++, Q-Dir and others.
Everything wasn’t plain sailing under Wine. There’s lots of programs that aren’t compatible with Wine. We wouldn’t recommend Wine for gaming, multimedia, video editing, and more. It really comes down to what Windows programs you can’t live without, and whether Wine will run them well on the Lenovo. Ultimately, you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.
Next week we’ll report on how the machine performs running some basic games.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Dual Booting
Page 3 – Wine
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Lenovo M93 Ultra Small Desktop PC | |
|---|---|
| Week 6 | Recording video using OBS Studio |
| Week 5 | We put the M93 through some light gaming |
| Week 4 | Multiple operating systems running on the Lenovo M93 |
| Week 3 | Video and audio are tested on the Lenovo machine |
| Week 2 | Benchmarking the Lenovo M93 Ultra Small PC with other low power machines |
| Week 1 | Introduction to the series including wiping Windows and installing Manjaro |
This blog is written on the Lenovo M93 Ultra Small Desktop PC.