Ubuntu – the difference between wine versions: stable, staging, devel, development

winewinetricks

I tried to install wine using these commands:

sudo apt-get install -y wine

And:

sudo apt-get install wine

But terminal says that:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package wine is a virtual package provided by:
  winehq-staging 2.16.0~zesty
  winehq-stable 2.0.2~zesty
  winehq-devel 2.16.0~zesty
  wine-development 2.0-3ubuntu1
You should explicitly select one to install.

E: Package 'wine' has no installation candidate

So there are 4 different version of wine.

What is the difference between these versions. Which one is better?

I wanted to install Internet Explorer from it and I installed winehq-stable. But I couldn't see that among applications in Winetricks. Do the other versions of wine have more applications to install? What is the difference?

Best Answer

Here the difference between the packages:

  • winehq-staging: this is the most recent testing wine version.
  • winehq-stable: this is the current stable wine version (probably the one you should install)
  • winehq-devel: this package is used to provide development headers, mostly used by third party software compilation.
  • wine-development: unsure for this one, but probably helps wine developers to debug EXE running with wine with more debug information.

I can also recommand to use PlayOnLinux that provide automated install of many Windows Application by using the most appropriate wine version.

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