Wine:Way to run Windows application in Apple MacBook

Introduction

Laymen explanation

Are you a website developer using MAC as primarily environment, you quickly want to test your websites in Windows-based browsers.

Are you dependent on Windows in a sense that you are looking for Windows app when you are using MACbook? This can happen if your company provides you with a login, mail, calendar and contacts that only work on certain browsers.

This article helps in this regard.

Technical explanation

The name Wine initially was an abbreviation for Windows Emulator. Wine is an open source program for running Windows software on non-Windows operating systems. While it’s most often used on Linux, Wine can run Windows software directly on a Mac, too–without requiring a Windows license or needing Windows running in the background.

How it works

Wine emulates the Windows runtime environment by translating Windows system calls into POSIX-compliant system calls,[8] recreating the directory structure of Windows systems, and providing alternative implementations of Windows system libraries,[9] system services through wineserver[10] and various other components (such as Internet Explorer, the Windows Registry Editor,[11] and msiexec[12]). Wine is predominantly written using black-box testing reverse-engineering, to avoid copyright issues.[13]

Wine implements the Windows application binary interface (ABI) entirely in user space, rather than as a kernel module. Services normally provided by the kernel in Windows[39] are provided by a daemon known as the wineserver, whose task is to implement basic Windows functionality, as well as integration with the X Window System, and translation of signals into native Windows exceptions.

Wine ensures good backward compatibility with legacy Windows applications, including those written for Windows 3.1x.[49]Wine can mimic different Windows versions required for some programs, going as far back as Windows version 2.0.

Limitation

This isn’t necessarily the best option if you want to run Windows software on a Mac. Wine isn’t perfect, and not every application will run ideally. Some applications will crash or not run at all.

Because of Wine's ability to run Windows binary code, concerns have been raised over native Windows viruses and malware affecting Unix-like operating systems.[93]Wine can run most malware, but programs running in Wine are confined to the current user's privileges, restricting some undesirable consequences. For this reason the developers of Wine recommend never running it as the superuser.

Comparison with alternative solution

Virtual machines and Boot Camp are more rock-solid options, but they do add more overhead and require a Windows installation. Also, VM needs Windows license which incurs extra cost if you are interested to run few Apps and so because the app owner has not provided MAC version.

MAC Installation

Download MAC package from https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/macosx/download.html and follow the instruction.

Useful link

https://www.howtogeek.com/263211/how-to-run-windows-programs-on-a-mac-with-wine/

http://winebottler.kronenberg.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)

https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/macosx/download.html