What is the easiest and safest way of installing Wine on Linux Mint 21.x?
Short Answer:
Provided there is no previous Wine installation present on your system or any left over Wine parts from a failed Wine installation attempt,
then the answer can be found on the Linux Mint 21.x Release Notes webpages.
In all other case, please, read the longer answer in the post below.
It is really as simple as that. Using the wine-installer will give you Wine 6.0.3 from the Linux Mint software repositories.Linux Mint 21.1 'Vera' Release Notes - Section 'Wine' wrote:
Wine
To install the complete version of WINE, open a terminal and type:
apt install wine-installer
Among other things, this will install wine-desktop-files, which adds menu entries for regedit, your C:\ drive and other items which are missing from upstream WINE.
This will work on all Mint 21.x releases, no matter whether your desktop environment is Cinnamon, Mate or xfce.
Though the Release Notes do not mention so, but before installing Wine, take a manual Timeshift snapshot. You want a Timeshift snapshot, because Wine is very complex. In case something fails, uninstalling Wine and all its dependencies is quite a complex operation. Restoring the Timeshift snapshot will be much easier.
After you have installed Wine by executing the commandline given above, you should launch "Configure Wine" from the Mint application menu - Submenu "Wine" and configure Wine.
Once you have finished this step as well, you are ready to install Windows applications through Wine.
Note:
Please, be aware that not all Windows applications will work perfectly, when invoked by Wine. Before installing a Windows application under Wine, you may like to check the WineHQ Application Database, WineHQ AppDB, in order to find out how Wine users rate a specific application when run under Wine. Applications rated Platinum or Gold should work almost perfectly. Any lower rating promises serious trouble.