How to install Wine 7 on Debian 11 – Run windows apps on Linux easy

Hello, friends. This is a short post that may be useful to both sysadmin and many desktop users. Today, you will learn how to install Wine 7 on Debian 11.

Wine 7 is the latest stable branch of a project that has been with us for many years. With wine, we can have a layer of compatibility that allows us to run Windows software on Linux.

Thanks to an active development, Wine 7 comes with many interesting new features. For example, the inclusion of the Windows-on-Windows 64bit architecture (WoW64) that allows us to install 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Linux systems.

Another exciting aspect of Wine 7 is that now the included applications support HiDPI and the Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.2.201 of the graphics API and initial support for Direct2D effects has been introduced.

So, as we can see, Wine continues to move forward with more and better support. That is why many users consider it necessary to always have the latest stable version.

Let’s go for it.

Install Wine 7 on Debian 11

Wine is included in the official Debian repositories, but as expected not the latest stable version.

So let’s update the whole operating system first.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

After this, enable support for the 32-bit architecture.

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Download the GPG key from Wine 7 repository

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key

Now you have to add it to the system.

sudo apt-key add winehq.key

The next step is to add the Wine repository

sudo nano /etc/apt/source.list

And at the end of the file you have to add the following line

deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/ bullseye main

Save the changes and close the file.

Refresh APT.

sudo apt update

And proceed to install Wine 7 by running

sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

After the process finishes, you can check the version of the installation by running

wine --version
wine-7.0

So, you can use it without any problems.

Conclusion

Wine is one of the most popular projects because it gives us unique opportunities like running Windows applications on Linux. Even if it doesn’t always work, sometimes it’s worth a try. In this post, we have explained how to install Wine version 7.

Thank you.