Comment 13 for bug 1576326

Tagging as "Opinion". We made some changes in the meantime, which address some, but not all related requests.

wine.desktop is provided as example in /usr/share/doc/wine/examples/wine.desktop. This is what probably most people here want, so that they can start an exe graphically by double-click or open-with. But it has the biggest risk of inadvertently running windows malware, and therefore won't be installed activated. Further I think it does users a disservice by obfuscating errors during installation of a Windows application, which unfortunately happens quite often.

You get activated binfmt support with the "wine-binfmt" package, which is suggested by wine. This helps when working in a text-terminal. Not installed by default because of security risks, and others explicitly not wanting this feature.

For these two issues please also see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/256880 [ubuntu helps spreading windows viruses]).
/usr/share/doc/wine/README.Debian.gz (https://salsa.debian.org/wine-team/wine/raw/master/debian/README.debian) also explains it, and gives the needed manual commands.

If you install a Windows application which installs a desktop launcher, then that is also on the Linux desktop. Not verified, but this should be true for menu entries, too.

If you install a Windows application which comes with file associations (e.g. MS Word for .doc) these associations are also created in the Linux system.

So that only leaves Menu entries of winecfg and such. They might be added if they are taken upstream (winehq.org). But personally I see no use in them, and I assume most requests were not about them. This topic is at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/1493044.

All above is valid for both wine and wine-development in Ubuntu.

Did I miss anything?

If anything of the above is not working as described please file a separate bug.