Wine
Also known as Winelib, W.I.N.E., WineHQ, Windows Emulator, Wine Is Not an Emulator
compatibility layer for running Windows software on Unix-like systems
Key facts
- Original authors
- Bob Amstadt, Eric Youngdale
- Developers
- Wine authors , (1,989)
- Initial release
- 4 July 1993 ; 32 years ago ( 1993-07-04 )
- Stable release
- 11.0 / 13 January 2026
- Preview release
- 11.10 / 30 May 2026
- Written in
- C
- Operating system
- Linux FreeBSD ReactOS (for Windows app and driver compatibility) macOS ( 10.8 – 15 ) (development) Android (experimental) Haiku (experimental)
- Platform
- IA-32 , x86-64 , ARM
- Available in
- Multilingual
- Type
- Compatibility layer
- License
- LGPL 2.1 or later
- Website
- winehq.org
Article
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 code to ARM code.