I tried as well, but most of the apps crashed sooner or later. And installing all these i386 rubbish is annoying.
OK, you got me.
Iāve occasionally used Wine - with mixed successā¦
I got Microsoftās Age of Empires II to run via Wineā¦ It mostly worked okayā¦ **
And I also got Autodeskās SketchBook Pro for Windows running in Wineā¦ That just seemed to just āworkā - install it through Wine and run it through Wineā¦ No mussingā¦ AoE II was a different story - all sorts of stuff it needed, like ādot.netā and DirectXā¦ Interesting side fact : SketchBook Pro was an āAliasā product, owned by Silicon Graphics, along with Alias Wavefront (now āMayaā) - and SketchBook was available on SGI IRIX (mip64 UNIX) and MS Windows!
I have a whole bunch of Vector Art that Iāve created over the last 35-ish yearsā¦ Mostly in CorelDrawās proprietary file formatā¦ So I tried to get CorelDraw to run in Wine - yeah - nah! All too hard and I gave upā¦ I did eventually get my head around InkScape - but - thereās still some CDR (CorelDraw vector) files Iād like to openā¦ There are converters and stuff - but - they donāt play well - CDR supports multipage - none of the conversion tools I found worked well (and nearly all my CDR files were multipage)ā¦ Multipage was a feature I sorely missed while using InkScape - but - then āHEY PRESTO!ā about 2-3 years ago InkScape 1.2 comes out with : you guessed it! MULTIPAGE DOCUMENTS!
And InkScape file format is OPEN SOURCE SVGā¦ One thing I LOVE about SVG is itās really just a text fileā¦ and if youāve got strings of text in there - you can tweak them with the vast array of UNIX and OSS text tools for CLI - like sed and awk! I really should Patreon them some money - as I use InkScape all the timeā¦
What annoys me about how hard it is to get CorelDraw to work in Linux - Corel themselves tried to be a Linux vendor and there was once āCorel Linuxā - and competitor with Microsoft - they had Wordperfect, and Borlandās Quadro Pro spreadsheet - AND - they tried to sell CorelPaint (not the same product as CorelDraw!) as native Linux product - but - guess what? IT was just the Windows version with some Wine wrappers/instalers/scripting around it!
** I donāt need to do that anymore - I bought Microsoft Age of Empires II HD Edition via Steam and SteamPlay does ALL of the stuff behind the scenes (e.g. Dot.Net, DirectX blah blah)ā¦
The east bank of the Rhine, which has usually been the boundary between Francophone, and Germanic languages for 2000 years (since Augustus lost his 9th legion in the Teutoberg forest) has been famous for white wines for hundreds of years : reisling is a German wineā¦
Actually, Oregon, Washington, and California are walking off with gold medals in many worldwide competitions. France is down the list now, following Australia and New Zealand.
Gives me a headache but not sure why. Research suggests itās to do with Histamines in the production.
I run several windows apps for web site work using wine. (Dreamweaver mainly) but have had office working only issue occasionally a screen looks odd but refresh sorts it.
Iām fully with you here. Not to forget the ability of reasonable file versioning.
Our greatest export ever was AC/DCā¦ (NOT: Alternating vs Direct Current! that was either, or both, Edison and Tesla - I think Edison electrocuted an innocent elephant to death prove his theory - I could be wrong - but killing an elephant? Thatās ALWAYS WRONG!)ā¦
So some purists will state that Bon Scott, and the Young brothers were both Scottish bornā¦
Yeah - the Young brothers (their older brother George formed the Easybeats with a fellow Dutch āimmigrantā - Australiaās first foray into international music along with a Yorkshire born pommie Stevie Wright) are technically Scottish - as was Bon Scott (obvious!).
Also - Australians call English people pommies - my wife is one (and her ancestry is Yorkshire - like @callpaul.eu - which makes her 100% correct in any argument - even when sheās clearly wrong!) - itās rhyming slang for āpommegranateā : yeah - it doesnāt quite rhyme : immig-grant VS pommie-granate - but close enoughā¦
And none of the founding fathers of AC/DC - arguably the greatest rockānāroll band of all time were even fāking pommies - and - Scotland fought like 1000 years of wars to tell the English they were better anywayā¦ The Scots are not pommie bastards 
ā¦
And Bon Scott grew up in West Australia - and was incarcerated in juvenile incarceration centres hereā¦
Bon Scott would have been 80 last Thursdayā¦ I caught a tribute band on Friday night playing Bon Scott AC/DC songsā¦ still coming down off itā¦
How bizarre! I still call post-ā:Bon Scottā AC/DC ānew AC/DCā - but Back In Black with Brian Johnson singing came out 46 years ago! Brian Johnson is technically a Pommie - but - are Geordies technically English? @callpaul.eu ? And itās harder to understand a Geordie in full flight than a Scotsman or an Irishman or even a Scouser! Surely the hardest accent to understand in regional UK is the Geordie/Jordie - WTF? Is that even English?
Apologies in advance for derailing this thread - but it was some pommie expat who lives in France who started derailing itā¦
Mine was a serious derail. Not going to mention kylie or sir les Patterson as auz exports.
Dont be concerned. Derailments never worry me. They are sometimes the best part of a dry topic.
So, after a bit of footering at the start to get Bottles to behave, Iām pleased to report itās been much more stable than Wine and has resolved both my issues running the Sims 4.
Wine Bug 1; widgets.Engagement.controls::InterstitialMessageDialog
TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
I worked around this in Wine by running the app with firejail to enforce a no network mode that avoided whatever code path triggered initialising the engagement/interstitial system. With Bottles, this bug just doesnāt seem to occur in the first place.
Wine Bug 2; when I tabbed away from the application or locked the computer etc, the in game objects all seemed toā¦ explode onscreen? Just a graphics bug, but I had to restart the game each time to fix it. With Bottles, I can tab away, lock the computer, minimise etc with zero graphics issues in-game.
I had the game installed on a separate SSD, so Native Wine could see and run it fine but Bottles/Flatpak couldnāt. Tried flatpak override but I guess the GUI file picker was still using the XDG Document portal? So whilst CLI launch was working, the GUI wasnāt. Created a permanent D: drive mapping in the bottleās dosdevices folder pointing to the real SSD path and itās all good now. Iāve Symlinked the save/mods folder so it accesses my existing stuff and Iāve been pretty happy.
This is really the only Windows .exe I run with regularity on Linux Mint, so whilst not a complete test of Bottles capability, it does seem like Bottles is the better solution for me and Iāll be switching to Bottles for the Sims for the time being. I get that Bottles is still running Wine underneath, but whatever config stuff itās doing under the hood seems to have resolved my issues.
That is really great. Thank you.
I cant try it myself, because I do not have any Win apps , but at least now I know we can recommend it .
and
I am glad your effort was rewarded.
I may even be able to persuade @callpaul.eu to bottle Excel.
The current issue of Linux Magazine has an article on Bottles. That is where I found it. They do not usually feature things that are clunky.
It would seem that bottles does a better job of configuring Wine than anyone would be likely to do using Wine directly.
I dont need convincing personally as I dont need excel any more, sheets or libreoffice does enough for me.
Its my secretary of the association i need to convince, but dont want to go down renting office products for one members whim
It is a really stupid situation ., He could do his trivial bookkeeping with a text file.
How about ā office bearers shall supply their own computer and softwareā
Currently my user does, but that stops all other accessing the membership file. Suspect its a power thing, when asked how many members or who joined which bit only he can answer. He forget I get access to the raw data through a online form submission so if he left I would just rƩcrƩation it, would take me a while as I stock it in csv format and I would need to pars it.
There are tools for doing things to csv files.
The way we dealt with irrational requests to buy computers at work was to have a policy ā¦ one brand for the whole site.
He can download Excel into an Android tablet. I think it is free there?
No such thing as a free lunch or microsoft product !
There is a web version for free home use but limited features just like sheets from google
Note : Iāve found Excel from the O365 suite works 100% just perfect in a modern web browser - like Google Chrome, or MS Edgeā¦
SIX years ago I was doing online collaboration on an Excel Spreadsheet - in Google Chrome to Excel online - and working with colleagues also updating stuff in the spreadsheet - it just worked!
Iām on a roster for on-call after hours issues with UNIX or Linux servers at some of my customersā¦ The roster is an Excel spreadsheetā¦ I open it in MS Edge on MacOS - update it and it autosavesā¦ I donāt think Microsoft do Edge on Linux any more? WRONG: They do still publish Edge for DEB based distros like Ubuntu, Debian (so Mint too!) :
Just install that - get a license for O365 (you can try it out with a free version of Outlook Online) and run MS Excel in a browser like Chrome, Brave, Edgeā¦
Hereās Excel being offered in my āfreeā Outlook account - in a Brave Browser tab on my Ubuntu 24.04 desktop machine - it works 100% :
So - you may not need to Bottle or Wine-ify Excel (lots [most?] of people really struggle, and give up, trying to get recent versions of MS Office to run in Wine - MS Office and Adobe Photoshop seem to be the two most common things that wonāt run in Wine).
Shame you canāt get the source code to Gnumeric, and change all the naming and branding to Excel, build it from source and tell him heās got excel!
Tried that with on line version from chromium browser, but when he gets caught out he changes the subject to other issues, drive mapping being the latest problemā¦ No pleasing some
Sounds āentitledā - he probably got mummy (maman?) to insist he go straight to biro (or ābicā) from pre-school, instead of crayon ā pencil ā biro