Windows Programs, Their Extensions, and Wine

Some people feel that Windows should just die. And its little programs too. Others, however, rely on certain “exclusive” Windows programs, whether it's because of their employer or their own personal taste. While I personally look forward to going completely Linux, there are still a few programs in Windows that I feel are superior to current Linux alternatives. For those, I must run them with the help of Wine (or a virtual machine, but that's beyond this article), a program (that's not an emulator) that allows you to run many Windows programs within Linux. Now, given the fact that there are so many programs exclusively on Windows, your obscure tax form application most likely won't be supported in Wine. Many of those programs are so tied to the Windows way of doing things that the more complex ones most likely won't be compatible. I personally have had some success with some of the smaller programs I used pretty extensively in Windows. HashX, a program I use to compare files I download to the originals, ensuring that I received the file intact and as the author intended; and Easy Duplicate Finder, a program that helps identify any duplicate files I may have so that I can delete them (although FSLint, for Linux, seems to have a decent duplicate finder component as well), are two examples.

One thing I noticed, though, was that when I double-clicked on one of the programs running with Wine, I would get a pop-up message stating that the content of the file didn't match its extension (.exe). As a result, I had to manually right-click the file and choose to run it with Wine in order to use it. This was pretty annoying. Thankfully, the fix was easy: all I had to do was rename the files by deleting the “.exe” part, and then I was successfully able to run them by double-clicking.

One of the many things I like about Ubuntu is that it doesn't necessarily need a file to have an extension to function—rather, it simply looks at the file content to determine which application should open it. For instance, a simple text file named “README” would open up just fine in gedit (or your preferred text editor) under Ubuntu, but it would choke up Windows, and you'd be required to add a file extension in order to use it (unless you right-clicked the file and manually opened it with a specific program). So it looks like the concept works similarly for Wine-driven programs, with the difference that you pretty much must remove the file extension if you want to be able to run a program by simply double-clicking it.