Wine is open source software that allows the execution of Windows application without actually having windows.

As an alternative to dual booting Windows or Virtualizing Windows on your Linux box, Wine can be a powerful tool for running Windows application that have not yet been ported to Linux. Unfortunately, with the market share overwhelmingly in favor of Windows, it can be difficult to find your favorite application on Linux; there are a lot of alternative applications that fill the gap, such as openoffice.org instead of Microsoft Office, GIMP instead of Photoshop, Evolution Mail instead of Outlook, but despite these great applications, there are still a few more programs out there for Windows that you won't find with Linux.

One type of application we at LinuxHow2 use Wine for are games. There are a lot of good games out there for Linux, but we have to admit that the sheer number of games written for Windows well outweighs those written for Linux, and there just isn't an equivalent for a lot of these games. Wine, because it uses openGL, can play most of these games, and it plays them well. Don't fall for the myth that Wine is slow; there have been some benchmarks showing that Wine running windows applications can be faster than Windows running those same applications; in fact, system tasks won't have any degradation of performance under Wine.

Wine can be installed for free using all of the popular versions of Linux through their respective packaging systems. Some systems, such as Ubuntu, have separate Wine packages for fonts and additional DLLs, while other distros keep everything in one package. Do a little research into your favorite distro to see how it handles support for Wine. Also, there are a couple of purchasable wrappers to wine, such as Crossover and Cedega, the former contains additional DLLs and files for making it easier to run Office applications, whereas the latter is geared towards the gaming industry, containing more advanced graphics and sound DLLs for your latest and greatest games; both of these cost a little money, but they're a lot cheaper than buying a copy of Windows and virtualizing it.

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