How to Install Wine on Ubuntu (The Right Way)

The new Wine 11.0 release offers better-than-ever support for running Windows apps and games on Linux distributions like Ubuntu.

While it is easy to install Wine in Ubuntu using the App Center (or Ubuntu Software on older releases) or apt at the command line, the version of Wine in Ubuntu’s archives is always an older version.

To benefit from the newest features, drivers, bug fixes and compatibility tweaks you should install the latest stable Wine release on Ubuntu from the official Wine repository.

Sounds like effort? It’s not; it’s easy to add the official repo on Ubuntu. Just follow the steps below (adapted from the official WineHQ Wiki to make them easier to follow), and if you hit any issues with unmet dependencies, see the troubleshooting section at the end.

I use the command-line in this guide. It’s faster, less prone to issues and works on all Ubuntu versions/flavours as well as Ubuntu-based Linux distros like Zorin OS and Linux Mint.

Installing New Wine Releases in Ubuntu

The Wine 8.0 configuration window showing the new light mode.

Step 1: Enable 32-bit support

First things first: to use Wine in Ubuntu you must enable 32-bit support. While newer versions of Wine do include Wow64 (which can run 32-bit, and even 16-bit, Windows apps and games on 64-bit distros, it’s still considered a WIP).

If you are reading this article from Ubuntu then I know that you use a 64-bit build. How? Because I’m psychic—just joking: Ubuntu discontinued 32-bit builds in 2017.

Despite having a big clear out of 32-bit packages, the Ubuntu repos do contain a number of relevant 32-bit libraries and multilib dependencies needed to support the 32-bit architecture via Wine.

To enable 32-bit support in Ubuntu, open your terminal and run this command:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

If you need Wine for ARM64 (e.g., Raspberry Pi) you MUST stick to the version available in the Ubuntu repos. Wine ARM is also not yet as featured or as compatible as Wine for Intel/AMD systems.

Step 2: Add the Wine Repo Keys

To install a the latest stable release of Wine in Ubuntu you need to add the official Wine Ubuntu repo.

But in order to install packages from that repo, you need to allow your system to securely communicate with it —that means importing its security key.

This bit looks more scary than it is, but you can’t skip it.

First, create a new keyring:

sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings

Second, add the official Wine repo key to it:

wget -O - https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key -

That’s it.

Step 3: Add the Official Wine Repo

If you don’t know which version of Ubuntu you use, go and check via Settings > System > About. You will need to know which version of Ubuntu you use so that you can run the next command correctly.

If you use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ‘Noble Numbat’ (or a flavour, spin, derivative, etc based on it, like Linux Mint 22.x), run this command:

sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/noble/winehq-noble.sources

If you use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ‘Jammy Jellyfish’ (or a Linux distro based on it, like Linux Mint 21.x) you should run this command:

sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/jammy/winehq-jammy.sources

Only run the command with the correct codename that matches your Ubuntu version

Ubuntu version	Codename to use
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS	focal
Ubuntu 25.04	plucky
Ubuntu 25.10	questing
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS	resolute

Step 4: Install Wine

Now you are ready to do what you can to do: install Wine on Ubuntu!

sudo apt update && sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

When you run this command (and enter your user password to authenticate) you will be presented with a long list of packages that apt will download, install and upgrade.

In some cases you may also notice that some packages will be removed..

You must PAY ATTENTION to the list of removals; critical packages like ubuntu-desktop and xorg are sometimes be listed for removal, so don’t idly whack y to proceed. If you don’t feel comfortable with what you see listed for removal, hit n to cancel.

The good news is that on a vanilla Ubuntu system installing Wine from the official repo will usually “just work”, no conflicts. Allow everything listed ample time to download, unpack, install, and configure itself before panicking.

Once the whole process completes, close the Terminal window.

There is no “Wine” launcher in the Applications grid after you install Wine
Right-click on a Windows installers or runtime to open them with Wine
Run winecfg from the command line to access the Wine configuration tool

Unmet dependencies?

If you see an error stating winehq-stable : Depends: winehq-stable (= x.x) but it is not going to be installed, it usually means your system has a library conflict or is missing a specific 32-bit component that apt can’t resolve automatically.

The most common fix is to run the following command in your terminal. This will manually install the most frequent “offender” libraries:

sudo apt install libasound2-plugins:i386 libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libsqlite3-0:i386

Still stuck? If you have third-party PPAs, they may provide versions of libraries that are “too new” for Wine. Try disabling the PPA or running sudo aptitude install winehq-stable to see which dependency is being held back.