Ok, I think this might be more of a Timeshift (Mint's system backup, restore and "cloning" tool) problem than a Wine problem, but it's worth raising here.
I worked out a method ( https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums ... snapshots/ ) to use Timeshift as a system cloning tool. Only under some circumstances, when restoring a system Wine programs which have been cloned don't work after restoring.
I can't understand why. On Linux "everything is a file", so what could be special about Wine's files (I understand it has exe programs that were installed via via within a subdirectory of the user's home directory, but it also has some system level folders for the Wine executables themselves) which means they (technically Snap programs can suffer this fate too) fail to restore when everything else restores perfectly on to a system where Timeshift has been used for cloning from one device to another.
Is there something special about Wine which would mean that when restoring from an rsync (that is what Timeshift is beneath it's GUI) backup, Wine programs won't work while all the native Linux executables (including apt-get installed things, and deb file things, and manually installed extracted folder programs, and things compiled from source) all clone just fine.
There's more info at:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=431526
and
https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift/issues/335
What is it which is "weird" about Wine in this context?
After one of these restore's Wine can be made to work again on the cloned system, but it requires removing all the Wine stuff and reinstalling it. I don't know much about tracing errors in Wine, but I think that when Wine programs fail on a cloned system it may have something to do with winetricks, corefonts, vcrun6 and vcrun2005. Is there something about these which might mean they might not copy like normal files? If there is though, then things get doubly strange because under some circumstances they do still work when restoring on another computer, yet in other circumstances they fail. In particular there seems to be something to do with the different ways in which the Timeshift snapshot has been "treated" between making it and trying to restore from it, when it has been subjected to the compression I describe in the tutorial then the failure of Wine after restoring is certain to occur, when it hasn't been through the compression then, at least some of the time, Wine programs work fine on the restored system.
Thank you
P.S. To all the Wine devs, this is the first time I've posted here so, thank you very much for the tool that enabled me to ever consider escaping Windows and moving to Linux in the first place many years ago.
