Somehow Messed Up Linux through Wine Uninstallation

[MinterTheMaladroit]

Hi,

I needed to run a Windows executable, thus I installed Wine on my Linux Mint 19 (x64). This executable file required .NET Framework 4.61, so I also installed Winetricks. Getting this right took so long that I even forgot the required version of .NET and jumped into the installation of dotnet40. I, soon, realized that I needed 4.61, so via the uninstaller in Winetricks, I uninstalled .NET stuff. However, I guess they were not completely uninstalled, because it told me that I could not install 4.61 when dotnet40 was already installed.
After being not able to resolve the issue, I decided to re-install Wine and ran multiple commands to purge Wine. I also searched for Wine and deleted the files associated with it.

To reinstall Wine, I executed the following command:

sudo apt install wine-stable

In return, it said "Wine-stable is already the newest version (3.0.2~bionic)."
Then I executed this command:

wine

But the output was "Command 'wine' not found, but can be installed with: sudo apt install wine-stable".

Now that I cannot even install Wine, I have no idea what to do.

Any advice is appreciated,
Thank you

 

[arochester]

Wine is not run by itself.

Run Wine using the

wine path/to/appname.exe

command.

Source - https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User's_Guide

 

[MinterTheMaladroit]

I went on and installed wine-development and it automatically removed wine-stable.
Thank you.

 

[wizardfromoz]

Hi @MinterTheMaladroit and welcome to linux.org . Glad to see your problem was able to be remedied.

As you are a 'Tara' user, I would advocate using Timeshift (which is installed on your Distro) to take a snapshot of your system before introducing any potentially finicky software (and Wine falls under that category). Then you can roll back your system should things go wrong.

You can read my Tute on Timeshift here https://www.linux.org/threads/timeshift-similar-solutions-safeguard-recover-your-linux.15241/

... or the Linux Lite 4.0 Distro's Manual has this very straightforward, Distro-agnostic summary of the steps (this was provided to us some time ago by the above @arochester , with thanks) https://www.linuxliteos.com/manual/tutorials.html#timeshift

Enjoy your Linux

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz