First we start by creating a wineprefix and installing our prerequisites from terminal:
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/GarminExpress winetricks dotnet452 vcrun2010 corefonts
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/GarminExpress winetricks win7
Note: You will be prompted during the setup for .NET installation just hit next and finish. Also, I like to seperate win7 after the prerequisites are setup to make sure the wineprefix runs in Windows 7 mode.
With that out of the way we need to download and install our GarminExpress.exe Setup executable. I downloaded mine from https://www.garmin.com/en-US/software/express
Run the GarminExpress.exe file in our wine prefix
WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/GarminExpress wine explorer /desktop=garmin,1366x768 /home/$USER/Downloads/GarminExpress.exe
Note: If you downloaded the GarminExpress.exe to another location replace it above
Modify your shortcut to be the following command
WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/GarminExpress wine explorer /desktop=garmin,1366x768 ‘/home/$USER/GarminExpress/drive_c/Program Files/Garmin/Express/express.exe’
Upon Launch you should see this screen which should recognize your Garmin device
Specific comment referenced above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg01Z6VCox0&lc=UgxEbqkGmPdwv0OUYpd4AaABAg
On Manjaro I had similar results, needed to update .NET (and maybe the other stuff like d3dcompiler_47 was necessary, I'm not sure).
The followup problem is that maps fail to update (at least for the nuvi 25 series), throwing the errors in Wine:
That leads me to https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=35667, I suspect that when Garmin tries to download the maps it can't properly encrypt/decrypt them or something. Maybe there's a manual install process that I just haven't found.
Device firmware updates do appear to work, I vaguely wonder if they're using a different encryption strategy? Or maybe there's a completely separate problem that I'm not aware of. I'll try to boot up a Windows VM and test to see if I see similar errors there. Express unsurprisingly doesn't show any user-accessible errors, it just says the maps failed to install.
Edit: I am able to download the maps locally to my device for Garmin's planning software or whatever it is. Could mean it's a problem with the device, could be irrelevant. I don't have the software installed to check to see if they import. Express isn't installing in any of my VMs, so 🤷, it's tough to debug that.