Empty wine desktop under linux?

Using wine under linux, I want to start up a Windows desktop which doesn't run any program. I then want to interact with that desktop's Start menu, desktop icons, etc.

I know that I can run a specific Windows executable in a desktop by doing this ...

wine explorer /desktop some_executable.exe

However, if I leave some_executable.exe off, then the empty Windows desktop simply opens and then closes a few seconds later.

Is there any way to use wine to simply start an empty Windows desktop that remains on the screen?

Thank you in advance.

2 Answers

I realize now that I can do the following:

• run winecfg, and under the "Graphics" tab, specify Emulate a virtual desktop
• then run winetricks explorer

This causes a virtual Windows desktop to be opened with explorer running. I can iconify explorer, and I can then run any wine-installed programs via that virtual Windows desktop.

This seems to be stable enough for my purposes.

WINE is not designed to create a stable Windows Desktop.

It provides a Linux system the limited ability to run some Windows-specific apps, but the Desktop is not one of them.

To do what you want, the well-accepted solution is to add desktop virtualization to your Linux system, using the Linux system as a virtualization host, if your hardware is capable (see for details).

Do cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep lm to confirm you have a 64-bit processor (required).

If so, then do cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -h "svm | vmx" to see if that CPU is virtualization-capable.

There are many virtualization host apps.