How do I use wine stable and wine staging together?

[solomonsays]

I have programs that run acceptably using stable and some that can only run under staging, but installing them both just leaves me with a confusing mess. for example i run a program in terminal with wine-staging, but later I try to run others with the original wine-stable (through terminal or folder) and it runs stuttering and crippled. On top of that, it is never clear what wine type is even being used, or whether I am even facing compatibility issues or not.

I assume all windows exe's now run under wine-staging as these programs never behaved this way until wine-staging is first used. The only way I can revert it is to completely remove wine-staging and restart my computer.

I tried to look for similar topics and am getting annoyed I've had this problem for days now but it seems like something I could figure out with winecfg or winetricks, but the interface is just cryptic and unhelpful for someone who has never used it before.

[dimesio]

The winehq-stable and winehq-staging packages are actually just metapackages that pull in the real packages and create symlinks so you don't have to use the full path to the wine binary when running it.

If you want both branches installed, install the wine-stable and wine-staging packages directly, without the metapackages. You will have to use the full path to the version you want when running Wine. I also recommend having separate wineprefixes for each of your apps, as overrides installed for one app may prevent another from working properly.

[solomonsays]

I was under the impression that I already had installed both packages directly by using the specific installation guides from their website. Also Ive never seen or heard anything about metapackages, so i wouldn't know how to not install them.

How to make separate wineprefixes is also not clear to me despite attempts at searching online for how I would even start.

[dimesio]

Sorry, I assumed you were using the WineHQ packages. The instructions here say to install winehq-devel, winehq-stable, or winehq-staging; those are the metapackages I mentioned, and they cannot be installed together. You can bypass that by installing wine-devel, wine-stable, and/or wine-staging instead. All three can coexist, but as I said, no symlinks will be created and you will have to specify the full path to the version you want to use in the command line and in any menu items or desktop links.

If you are using someone else's packages (including distro packages) you will have to ask for help on whatever support channels the package source provides.

Instructions on how to create separate wineprefixes are in the FAQ.

[Cybermax]

I was under the impression that I already had installed both packages directly by using the specific installation guides from their website. Also Ive never seen or heard anything about metapackages, so i wouldn't know how to not install them.

How to make separate wineprefixes is also not clear to me despite attempts at searching online for how I would even start.

Atleast in Ubuntu installing winehq-devel together with winehq-staging is a pita (Probably can hack your way through it, but i would not really recommend it).

So.. to have multiple wine versions you have a couple of options.
1. Probably the easiest, although "frowned upon" by the staff around here - Use something like PlayOnLinux or Lutris. That way you can juggle whatever versions you can muster in a easy manner AND sets up your wineprefixes in a easy-to-use GUI.
2. Compile your own versions and install them in separate folders. Bit more tedious, but that way you do not have to use 3rd party tools like mentioned in #1... but requires compiling and loads of extra source packages+++

As with everything Linux, going with #2 is both educational, frustrating and time consuming... And exactly the way its meant to be

[spoon0042]

There's maybe a 3. Or 1.5?

I'm half-to-reasonably sure the winehq packages are basically one directory under /opt that you can copy anywhere you like (or just dump the contents of a package if you're comfortable doing that). So if you have something that needs wine-devel 2.21 you can keep it in /opt/wine-devel-2.21 or whatever.

[Cybermax]

There's maybe a 3. Or 1.5?

I'm half-to-reasonably sure the winehq packages are basically one directory under /opt that you can copy anywhere you like (or just dump the contents of a package if you're comfortable doing that). So if you have something that needs wine-devel 2.21 you can keep it in /opt/wine-devel-2.21 or whatever.

Yeah, you could probably copy the folder to something else than wine-devel that will not be cleared out when removing the package, and just point to that when your run wine

Ubuntu atleast just symlinks "wine" and "wine64" in /usr/bin/ like /usr/bin/wine -> /opt/wine-devel/bin/wine

That solution was too easy to consider