I’ve also been playing with building wine on Apple Silicon (Sequoia), and though I was also able to successfully build for x86_86 (with Rosetta 2), it seems that I’m having issues with fonts that are basically making running anything with a GUI impossible. I can run cmd.exe without a problem, but things like explorer and notepad either don’t show up at all or open with an essentially blank window.

If I configure and build with freetype2, I get repeated errors about not being able to find the library even though I have it installed:

Wine cannot find the FreeType font library. To enable Wine to

use TrueType fonts please install a version of FreeType greater than

or equal to 2.0.5.

http://www.freetype.org

Then, eventually the following error:

0140:err:syslink:SYSLINK_SetFont Failed to create link font!

Configuring without freetype still results in the above SYSLINK_SetFont error. Attempts after the

I’ve found a few vague posts online from long ago about needing the 32-bit freetype2 libraries, but is that even a possibility anymore since Apple removed support for 32-bit code? I’ve also come across hints that System Integrity Protection might be getting in the way somehow, but I’m really not familiar with the details of how that works.

In any case, I have just set up a spare Linux box so I can hopefully have a smoother time getting started on contributing, but I was excited about working on this in a macOS environment. After seeing Rob’s post, I figured I would chime in just in case anybody has any tips. Forgive me if I am just way off in the weeds; it has been a long time since I've compiled any C code on Linux, much less on macOS.

-Don

From: robert lippmann <robert.lippmann.development@gmail.com>
Subject: Apple Silicon compilation
Date: February 23, 2025 at 7:55:59 PM EST
To: wine-devel@winehq.org
Reply-To: wine-devel@winehq.org

Hi all,

I tried to update the wiki to document how to compile Wine on Apple Silicon, but I’m not sure if it went through.

Basically, you need to add lld (which pulls in llvm) in addition to the other build dependencies
So:

brew install lld

Then:
PATH=`brew —prefix llvm`/bin:`brew —prefix bison`/bin:$PATH

Then everything compiles.

You probably don’t even need Xcode. And you probably should have Rosetta2 installed.

I haven’t actually been able to get it to run yet, though…

— Rob