Wine is an emulator (as much as they don't like you saying that) and not a very good one. I have defiantly had better luck installing real dot net (don't use mono for the love of GOD DON'T USE MONO) and VC++ into Linux then not. most common reason I couldn't get things to run was related to direct X but again you get what you pay for. If you use Wine don't whine when things don't work. See what I did there. :P

No, it's not an emulator. It's a wrapper.

Same thing really

Who cares. It works by making the game think it's on something that it's not. Is this really a conversation you want to have. Take the suggestions I've given you and see if you can get something to work.

Actually, it is, because it shows the problem with your solution and your thinking regarding the overall topic. An emulator simulates every aspect, while a wrapper is, essentially, a converter. Wine loads windows programs into linux and then jumps to the code. Basically, when an OS runs a program, it loads it, sets a few things, and then gives it a thread and lets it go, and this is known as a program loader. Wine is just that, it tries to load a PE file and execute it just as linux would load and execute an ELF file.

It's just semantics according to Wikipedia anything that tricks software is an emulator and according to Microsoft syswow64 is a 32Bit emulator. Seriously look it up lol. Your 32Bit dll are in syswow64 and your 64bit dll are in system 32.

I'm pretty good at getting stubborn software to work on both Windows and Linux I dont' care for semantics or jargon. What I care about is that it works. Which is why I'm okay with using both closed source and open source software. I care not for the FOSS philosophy, as long as it works. DRM prevents things from working which is why I like gog.

Then wikipedia is incorrect. The distinction is very, very important. By that definition your very processor is an emulator. 64bit is an emulation, etc. Hell, windows doesn't even make the 32bit support happen: the processor does. It was one of the important standards of the 64bit upgrade that switching between 32bit and 64bit be as smple as switching your segment registers. You'll find the thing defined as emulators to be less to your liking: they typically run very, very slowly.

My point is you get what you pay for. While there are some good OS software like VLC 7zip and what have you there's also a lot of bad ones but you don'r typically hear about those. Crossover is open source but is also kind of tragic. Had it been closed source it might've been more profitable. Instead everyone uses it's open derivative Wine. Most who say they support Linux are talking BS. Their idea of support is to simply use. If you really want to support Linux and open source you have to do it fictionally. IE paying for and using open source software like Crossover. Despite it being better software everyone uses Wine. Why? It's garbage. You'd think with the money saved on license fees from Windows they'd spend it on what little software Linux has that is good. Crossover does to a license activation but it can activated offline quite easily without the need to ping a server. You'll still need to have a hard copy of the library files needed to make it work but that's more a Linux problem then a Crossover problem

So, it has DRM? Yeah, no, if you support linux, you're not going to support DRM. Sorry. Linux and the idea behind it are so distant from DRM containing product that you'd have to be a fool to think that'd be OK.

You know what really ironic about that? Linux might not have DRM but it sure behaves like something that does. An almost constant internet connection is required to make both the package manager, index and repository work. As for Crossover's DRM well I hate DRM as much as anyone but if it's only a file that you can copy and paste into your system and nothing else needed I think that's okay. Same goes for putting in key codes as long as there's nothing else that needs to be done then I'm okay with it. Also just so you know a lot of gog games are installed with their DRM key codes pre-inserted. This technically means they still have DRM oh dear :-O

Actually, package managers work without an internet connection, so long as you don't use internet connection features.

And yeah, the DRM-free of gog is very much questioned. Fortunately, it's automatically thwarted for us, but that doesn't mean it won't rear it's ugly head in the future.

Have you ever tried to install a program from the repository without the internet. It's a nightmare

You might find it equally difficult to trying to view yahoo news without internet.

What's that got to do with anything?