I work in embedded systems. In that space, it's pretty common to need some vendor-provided tool that's Windows-only. I often need to automate that tool, maybe as part of a CI/CD pipeline or something.

If I were to do it with a Windows VM, I'd need to:

  1. Create the VM image and figure out how to build/deploy it.
  2. Sort out the Windows licensing concerns.
  3. Figure out how to launch my tool (maybe put an SSH server into the VM).
  4. Figure out how to share the filesystem (maybe rsync-on-SSH? Or an SMB fileshare?).

If I do it with Wine instead, all I need to do is:

  1. Install some pinned version of Wine.
  2. Install my tool into Wine.
  3. Run it directly.