wine-stable is missing the standard Wine menu entries / .desktop files

[John Steeves]

In every version of Ubuntu after 16.04, the wine package (now listed as "wine-stable" in the repositories) no longer appears to include the .desktop files (menu entries) for important Wine components such as:
    Configure Wine
    Uninstall Wine Software
    Browse C: Drive
..and most importantly
    the "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader" link (which normally appears in the right-click > "Open with..." menu in the file browser for .exe files)

This makes it nearly impossible for new users to figure out how to install Windows apps and use Wine, as it appears that all Wine functions are hidden behind Terminal commands.

Perhaps re-including these missing .desktop files into the wine-stable package could fix this usability regression?

P.S. I'm currently trying this on a daily build of Ubuntu 17.10 with the wine-stable package number 2.0.2-1ubuntu1

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: wine-stable 2.0.2-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.11.0-13.19-generic 4.11.12
Uname: Linux 4.11.0-13-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.6-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CasperVersion: 1.384
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Sat Aug 19 18:20:31 2017
LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Alpha amd64 (20170814)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: wine
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[John Steeves (jstevz4teh1337)]

When I was looking around some Wine repositories on another computer, I noticed that the Zorin OS guys have a Testing PPA for Wine builds with wine-stable 2.0.2 and the missing .desktop files included in the package (thereby fixing this usability bug). You can find the PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~zorinos/+archive/ubuntu/wine-testing

After trying out their wine-stable 2.0.2 package in Ubuntu 17.10, I can safely say that the menu entries they added work just as they did in the stock wine1.6 package in Ubuntu 16.04. It might be worth taking a look into what the Zorin OS guys did and incorporating it into the wine-stable package in the official Ubuntu repositories.

P.S. I've also installed the xenial package for wine-stable 2.0.2 from this Zorin OS PPA and it works very well under Ubuntu 16.04. Perhaps it might be worth backporting Wine 2.0.2 to 16.04 users?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[jre (jre-phoenix)]

[Speaking as Debian co-maintainer, Ubuntu is of course absolutely free to change the packages as they see fit.]

> Configure Wine
> Uninstall Wine Software
> Browse C: Drive

... for these I personally see no need, and when I asked in the past nobody was interested in sending these Ubuntu specific files to upstream. OTOH I'm also not aware of any risks or problems with those.

> "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader" link

First off, I absolutely get your point how this is unfriendly for users, especially inexperienced ones, in the first place. But this is only useful for applications which work flawlessly without the need for any workaround (applications which are rated platinum on appdb.winehq.org). Unfortunately these apps are only a very small part of all Windows applications.
So instead of giving users a very easy start in using Wine, followed by a big disappointment if the installation fails silently or some later issues exist ... instead of that I think it's better to look up the Wine instructions for any Windows application on appdb.winehq.org first. Getting users to be aware of this ressource imho is much more needed and helpful.

Now, back to the topic and the main reason why this doesn't work: "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader" is done by the wine.desktop file. That is already part of the wine-stable package, but not activated for security reasons. Quoting /usr/share/doc/wine/README.Debian.gz:

~~~~~~
System and desktop integration
==============================
You can configure your system to automatically launch Windows executables. But
this increases the risk of inadvertently launching Windows malware, so please
make sure that you understand the security risks before blindly setting this
up.
[...]
You can also make Wine known to your desktop environment. Then you may for
example in a filebrowser double-click on Windows executables to start them, or
right-click on them to "Open With Wine Windows Programs Loader".

To enable system-wide support for .exe files execute the following command
(replace /usr/share/doc/wine with /usr/share/doc/wine-development if you use
wine-development):
$ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/wine/examples/wine.desktop /usr/share/applications/

To support this only for your current user execute:
$ cp /usr/share/doc/wine/examples/wine.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
~~~~~

NOTE: I just realized that this documentation should refer to /usr/share/doc/wine-stable ("-stable" is missing. Only Ubuntu 16.10 to 18.04 are affected, later versions will have a regular "wine" package again.)

Suggestions how to improve the overall situation are very welcome, including places where things should be documented (I guess not many Ubuntu users are aware of /usr/share/doc/...).

This topic should be marked "Won't fix" from my perspective. Sorry.

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

Bug #1576326 (Xdg .desktop, .directory and mimetype files missing) seems to be a duplicate of this bug

[Lou (lou-gregory42)]

Is there a PPA anywhere that contains a usable wine-stable? Six months since the last post here and no progress seems to have been made...