(Note: a previous version of this question was overly verbose and didn't get to the point. I have completely rewritten it.)
On January 7 2022 (~3 weeks ago), I installed Wine following the WineHQ instructions (which I believe would have been version 6.0.2 at the time) on my Ubuntu 21.10 machine. After installation, the first time I ran anything using Wine, I was met by little graphical pop-ups which prompted me to install Mono, 32-bit Gecko, and 64-bit Gecko. I did this, and was afterwards able to run a Windows .NET application which depended on Mono & Gecko without problems.
When attempting a reinstall or new install of wine (now version 7.0.0), I am still prompted for mono, but no longer for (either version of) gecko. This happened on my Ubuntu 21.10, and also on an old 18.04 machine which I dusted off to test this. Note that the 18.04 has never had any version of Wine installed before: the problem thus occurs even in a complete 'virgin' installation.
According to WineHQ, the appropriate Gecko version for the current Wine version is still the same. So I tried to manually install the two (32-bit & 64-bit) Gecko .msi's.
I tried both wine msiexec and wine uninstaller. In both cases, wine uninstaller confirmed that both .msi's were successfully installed. However, the .NET application still failed to work properly.
I want to know what I should do to get a functional Gecko installation. Ideally, I would like to replicate the previous behaviour, where upon first startup of Wine, I am prompted for automatic installation of 32-bit Gecko & 64-bit Gecko.
