Desktop error and getting installed wine version- not

Question

I wanted to check which version of wine I'm updated to, but when I run

wine --version

in a terminal, it launches 2 wine windows instead of showing me the version. One is titled "Default - Wine desktop" with a Program Error box saying

The program (unidentified) has encountered a serious problem and needs to close

and the other window titled "1024x768 - Wine desktop" and no error box in the desktop. Both show the 2 apps on the desktop that I have installed.

Ubuntu 20.04 with gnome. I think I have wine 6, or at least 5. I also have q4wine and winetricks installed.

So

1. How can I resolve the error?
2. How can I verify which version I'm running?

(Couldn't add any tag except 'wine')

Answer 1

OK, got back to looking at this. I tried aptitude search wine and got everything wine related, including wine1.4 through wine1.7 all listed as "virtual," which in reading about virtual packages I take it these are supplied by one of the installed wine packages. If I run aptitude search wine|grep ^i I get:

i  q4wine - Qt GUI for WINE
i  wine-binfmt - Register Wine as the interpreter for Windows executables
i A wine-devel - WINE Is Not An Emulator - runs MS Windows programs
i A wine-devel-amd64 - WINE Is Not An Emulator - runs MS Windows programs
i A wine-devel-i386:i386 - WINE Is Not An Emulator - runs MS Windows programs
i  winehq-devel - WINE Is Not An Emulator - runs MS Windows programs
i  winetricks - simple tool to work around common problems in Wine

This is all a bit confusing. I guess the latest "version" I have is effectively wine1.7. Is this last one sometimes referred to as "wine 7?" I will keep digging to try to understand how wine works, and to get a better handle on using winetricks.

I still don't know the answer to why running wine --help opens 2 desktops, one with an error, and doesn't show me a version.