Wine Does Not Work At All for me

I've searched and searched the internet and found a million other people having problems with installing and using wine but nearly no one seems to have the same problem as me and of those that do, the advice given them doesn't seem to do anything to fix the problem for me...

In a nutshell, I install wine. If I do this through the terminal then I get some weird message about gecko being missing (whatever that is). I can find very little information about it and the only thing I did find told me how to install it but when I followed the instructions, I was told it wasn't in the repository to BE installed.

Worse still, when I run winecfg, I get all these errors:

0012:err:ole:marshal_object couldn't get IPSFactory buffer for interface {00000131-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}
0014:err:ole:marshal_object couldn't get IPSFactory buffer for interface {00000131-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}
0012:err:ole:marshal_object couldn't get IPSFactory buffer for interface {6d5140c1-7436-11ce-8034-00aa006009fa}
0012:err:ole:StdMarshalImpl_MarshalInterface Failed to create ifstub, hres=0x80004002
0012:err:ole:CoMarshalInterface Failed to marshal the interface {6d5140c1-7436-11ce-8034-00aa006009fa}, 80004002
0014:err:ole:marshal_object couldn't get IPSFactory buffer for interface {6d5140c1-7436-11ce-8034-00aa006009fa}
0014:err:ole:StdMarshalImpl_MarshalInterface Failed to create ifstub, hres=0x80004002
0014:err:ole:CoMarshalInterface Failed to marshal the interface {6d5140c1-7436-11ce-8034-00aa006009fa}, 80004002
0014:err:ole:get_local_server_stream Failed: 80004002
0012:err:ole:get_local_server_stream Failed: 80004002
Could not find Wine Gecko. HTML rendering will be disabled.
Could not find Wine Gecko. HTML rendering will be disabled.

If I install it through the ubuntu package manager, it also doesn't work... I cannot run windows installer .exe's with it and it doesn't appear a context menu item.

I've followed a million tutorials on it through to this point and I can get no further. It doesn't seem to be a functional piece of software. I don't get it... is it just not compatible with ubuntu 20.04?

is it just not compatible with ubuntu 20.04?

It is compatible with Ubuntu 20.04. You can have a working wine install on Ubuntu 20.04 as evidenced by these screenshots.

This shows wine 5.0 running on a 20.04 Ubuntu MATE system.

This shows the reason for the wine install, an old Windows birding app running under wine.

To install wine on this system, I issued the single command sudo apt install wine-stable. This resulted in the installation of a lot of packages.

Ok. I finally seem to have this working. :) The terminal is still throwing a few errors after running winecfg but it seems to actually be installed and install and run my windows programs now. The current stable version is 6.0.1. On Ubuntu 20.04, the correct install procedure is reasonably involved and is as follows:

You must uninstall wine and all other wine related apps first. Ie. Wine tricks etc.

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 
$ wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
$ sudo apt-key add winehq.key
$ sudo add-apt-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ focal main'
$ sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

For other versions of Ubuntu, see official instructions at this link: https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu.

A big thankyou to those people who actually genuinely tried to help me. I hope I can return the favour some day. :)