Wine
From wikinotes
wine is a program that converts win32 executables into programs that can run natively on *nix systems. This is very awesome, and enables you to use software that would otherwise be unavailable to you (such as MS office, games, etc).
As a user-friendly alternative to managing wine directly (managing multiple wine versions, prefixes etc) a program called playonlinux was created to wrap around it. It is very convenient.
Documentation
official docs: performance https://wiki.winehq.org/Performance
Notes
wine install wine usage wine configuration
Tools
winetricks wine mono
Examples
wine microsoft office wine zbrush 4r4 wine photoshop CS6