Linux has come a long way, but you may still need to run Windows applications occasionally – especially Windows-only PC games. Luckily, there are quite a few ways to run Windows applications on Linux.

Of course, before you try to run an old Windows program, you should look or alternatives that run natively on Linux. You’ll have a better experience if you can find a decent alternative that runs without any fiddling.

Use Wine
Wine is a compatibility layer that allows Windows applications to run on Linux. It’s basically an implementation of the Windows API on Linux. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t publish all the information we need to re-implement the Windows API from scratch, so Wine has to be reverse-engineered. While it works amazingly well given how little Microsoft has given us to worth with, it’s nowhere near perfect.