Wine Bar

A Wine prefix manager for Linux with explicit support for Apple silicon Macs (think Asahi Linux).

It works on regular x86_64 Linux systems as well, though this configuration receives less testing. Support for generic non-Apple arm64 systems is currently missing, though it shouldn’t be hard to add - PRs are welcome!

This project is mainly written in Dart / Flutter, with some C and C++ code for auxilliary tools.

The project was inspired by another project written in Flutter / Dart called Wine Prefix Manager, though no code from that project was used in this one.

Why have I created something from scratch rather than contribute to the above mentioned project? I had two goals:

1. To be able to run Windows software on my Linux-running Macbook Air M2, which is my daily driver. I didn’t want to use Steam, yet I wanted a user-friendly solution.
2. To learn Dart / Flutter. Normally I am a C++ guy.

I concluded that creating something from scratch was a better way to achive the 2nd goal.

Demo Video

WineBarDemo.mp4

Limitations

The only serious limitation of Wine Bar is how it handles running multiple apps simultaneously in the same Wine prefix. Perhaps I shouldn’t have allowed that in the first place, but for those rare cases where you really need that, I made that possible. When you launch more than one executable in the same prefix, you’ll notice some or all of the following symptoms:

1. Wine Bar will think your executable is still running when it has actually exited.
2. Force-stopping a running executable may do nothing or it may terminate all executables running in a prefix, not just the one you want to stop.

On Apple silicon Macs, these symptoms appear even when running executables in different Wine prefixes simultaneously.

The complexity here comes from the fact that the wine process starts the windows executable it was asked to run and then exits immediately without waiting for that windows executable to finish. That’s not terribly hard to workaround with a single windows executable running, but very hard for more than one executable. Currently, I don’t have plans to tackle this limitation.

Running

On regular x86_64 Linux systems, you are good to go!

On Apple silicon Macs, you need to install a few dependencies first:

On Debian-based distros:

sudo apt install muvm fex-emu

On Fedora-based distros:

sudo dnf install muvm fex-emu

Running an AppImage

While AppImages can be run just by making them executable and double clicking them, pinning them to a taskbar doesn’t work in most (all?) desktop environments. The suggested solution is to use an app called Gear Lever to open and run AppImages:

1. Install Gear Level.
2. Right click an .AppImage file and select Open with Gear Level or similar.
3. Click Move to the app menu.
4. Click Launch.

An .AppImage file started that way can be pinned to a taskbar just fine (on KDE at least). As a bonus, Gear Level can automatically update your AppImages. These URLs always point to the latest release of Wine Bar (WineBar-x64.AppImage, WineBar-arm64.AppImage) and may be used as update URLs in Gear Level.

Another option is the AppImageLauncher app, which works similarly to Gear Level.

Building

First, install Flutter (which also installs Dart) by following the official instructions. Don’t install Flutter from Snap, as it brings an old version of CMake with it, while we need a newer version for building our C/C++ helper tools. However, we do use Flutter from Snap in CI. See here how we workaround the issue with CMake.

This project cross-compiles some C++ code targeting Windows, so we need some additional dependencies to be able to do that:

On Debian-based distros:

sudo apt-get install mingw-w64-i686-dev g++-mingw-w64-i686 binutils-mingw-w64-i686

On Fedora-based distros:

sudo dnf install mingw32-gcc-c++ mingw32-binutils

Now, we are ready to build Wine Bar itself:

cd <project_folder>
flutter pub get
flutter build linux --release

And we are done!

Building an AppImage

cd <project_folder>
./packaging/scripts/build_appimage.sh <x64|arm64>

Regenerating the Generated Files

cd <project_folder>
dart pub global activate rps
dart pub global activate dbus

Now, we have to add $HOME/.pub-cache/bin to PATH. The way to do that depends on the shell you are running. For Bash, the following will do the trick:

echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.pub-cache/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Now, let’s generate the generated files.

cd <project_folder>
rps generate

About the Author

Checkout out my blog if you are interested!