Hi Ted,

With regard to 'wine' I offer the following in the spirit of "In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king".

Probably you're unaware of and missing one or more, perhaps several, 'dependencies' and helper programs and maybe also you need packages to support both 64-bit and i386 architectures.  Depends on both the particular applications you want to run and your particular flavor of Linux.  Try the wikis.  If there is not a good one for your distribution, or maybe even if there is, have a good look at 

https://wiki.debian.org/Wine#Optional_Wine_dependencies 

and 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine .  Be prepared to suffer a little brain damage.

If you're not sure about anything don't be afraid to try things out.  You're not likely to do any serious harm to your system.  If things don't work or go haywire, remove the new stuff you installed and delete the entire .wine directory before you start over.

As you may have gathered, I'm a big fan of MX Linux 'Live USB's.  That is, you have a complete separate Linux operating system on a thumb drive or SD card.  You can experiment and screw up all you want without ever placing anything on your computer's hard drive.  Moreover, MX has it's own easy-to-use, tested-and-curated proprietary point-and-click GUI package management system, 'MX Package Installer', that lists 'wine' among its offerings.  There's a high probability that it will be adequately configured to run whatever you install under it just fine, "right out of the box".  

'MX Package Installer' also offers 'Virtual Box' under which you may install 'Windows' and then install the programs you need under that in lieu of using 'wine'.  You might find that's an easier path to follow on your way to making a complete transition to Linux.

As for Linux email packages, in my experience, 'Thunderbird' does everything you can imagine and works just fine.  There's also the unofficial free desktop client for encrypted Proton Mail, i.e. a non-webmail version, called 'Electron Mail' that's very easy to use.  That one is a bit confusing to install when you're still new to Linux (mostly because you must download it from github.)  

But there again, however, an MX Linux 'Live USB' might come in handy as a safe, low-cost and relatively painless sandbox to practice in.

For what it's worth,

Tom

Hi

I am still on a quest to get to a point to become a solely linux user but because of work and other things not quite there yet

as for the personal side.'

If I can make use of wine for maybe a couple of programs that are just not available in linux I'll be happy.

As it is wine has not worked for me. out of the box none of these programs are working with wine.

I am lately using zorin and sofar like it a lot. i do prefer the more cutting edge distros since they allow me to run a lot of the stuff I need.

I haven't spend a lot of time with wine to troubleshoot but frustrating that i have to spend all this time to make something work with wine. 

for email my other big issue with linux, blue mail sofar the best but in my opinion still could use some basic improvements but it works.

mailspring was a great candidate but they totally drop the ball with o365 support and it's been a while. 

did I mention these are all on older desktops ? 🙂  still working well,

Ted

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