Recently I got access to an M4 mac mini computer to aid my development and engineering. However I need to run a bunch of windows simulation programs for my electrical engineering thus resulted into this deep hole of finding a FOSS way of running windows applications on MacOS.
Below is a list of some of my requirements

• It must be free to run
• have very few layers to run the applications.

Wine

An obvious choice is wine. The not an emulator from the GNU/LINUX world is an interesting option. The thought that wine should just work. The first issue I had was that the default package manager homebrew does not have support for installing wine and it had to be installed through the wine website.

After downloading and installing wine is installed but requires the installation of rosetta using

brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine-stable

softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

The above commands install both wine and rosetta and might require logging into you apple id again to approve the changes.

To ope an msi or exe program, enable all applications and choose open with wine.
However this results into an error that macos cannot verify the safety of the application. Thus the only proper way to run the app is to open the folder in a terminal like kitty and run
wine (program in msi and exe)
this will run the .msi or .exe program. The only problem being this creates a .desktop file while macos doesn’t know how to deal with this file extension.

Wine has the programs installed and can run them just need to find the right command in my opinion cause when we run through the msi installer for LTspice, It launches when I check the box to lauch the application.

Whiskey

Whiskey is a better implementation of wine that I could not get to work well due to a misssing component
I think this same component refused normal wine to work. Since whiskey is a wrapper around wine, wine no working whiskey no working.

Vmware Fusion Pro

This software is free only needing to create an account with broadcom giving you a fill windows vm that supports the apple arm architecture. However this option did not work well for me due to the storage requirements. My 256GB could not handle 2 operationg systems.