Faster & easier.

IIRC, there's a DOSBox bug that's already fixed in the SVN builds. Though I think that only crashed Wine, and not the OS?
Faster to extract it & fix up the conf file paths. I'll grant you it's more involved than running the installer via Wine.

Maybe it's just a misuse of terms -- I've seen plenty of core dumps with Wine before, but never a kernel panic.

If you are seeing a kernel panic, that almost always means one of three things:

1. There is a bug in the kernel. This is unlikely to be the case if you are using a stable kernel (unless you have some obscure hardware), but if you can reproduce the panic, you should report it as a kernel bug to the distribution.

2. Your hardware isn't working properly. This could mean that your hardware is failing; running something like memtest might be a good idea here.

3. You are intentionally doing things that no user would do; if you are doing this, you should know what to expect. Of course, you can crash the kernel by using the following command (as root):
# echo 'c' > /proc/sysrq-trigger

Those are definite possibilities, and I'm not saying any of your advice is wrong, but in the case of RAM failure I used to receive more "signal 11s" -- and that usually alerted me to some memory problem. Fortunately, these days memory chips seem to be somewhat more reliable than they used to be. :-)

When there is a RAM failure, the symptom you see depends on which memory location(s) is/are failing. If the failure is in memory used by the userland, you will see your programs segfault (as you noticed) or misbehave. If the failure is in the kernel, however, you might notice nothing (if the failure corresponds to some rarely used routine, like the code for the kernel;s panic() function, which is only called in case of a panic), you might get kernel panics or strange behavior (if the failure corresponds to code (or critical data, like the page tables)), or you might even fail to boot (if the failure affects the initial steps of loading the bootloader and decompressing the kernel). Note that strange behavior could lead to security compromises; a bit flip in the wrong place could result in security-sensitive code misbehaving.

Nah, journalctl confirms it.
EDIT: Never tried using oss drivers.
My hardware is not working properly, I know it. In fact, my northbridge may be half broken, IOMMU/Vt-d aren't working and my usb 3 chipset is completly fucked up.

Space Run: Fast and Safe Delivery
State: Flawless
Wine HQ entry: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=32885&iTestingId=93669
Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa
Kernel: 3.19.0-32-generic x86_64 (64 bit)
Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Curacao XT [Radeon R7 370 / R9 270X/370 OEM]
GLX Renderer: AMD Radeon R9 200 Series
GLX Version: 4.5.13416 - CPC 15.302
WINE: Wine Staging 1.9.9

From Winetricks I already had following installed: d3dx9_36, Quartz and vcrun 2010 - don't know if that was needed or not.

The game works the same as on Windows. No issues whatsoever.

Well, I was basically referencing what I used to get -- granted, I haven't actually had Linux running on any failing hardware since about 1995 or so! :-)

EDIT: Still got Linux running quite happily on about 5 PCs or so -- been using it since the SLS release in 1993.

EDIT 2: It's funny really, now that I think about it. It's only due to Linux that I found out my hardware was failing. It was a dual-booting machine, and Windows ran along quite merrily, running all kinds of programs, whilst Linux was segfaulting all over the place.. :-)

(Corrected SFS to SLS -- not sure how I managed to make that typo!)

Anybody tried to install Colonial Charter mod for Banished under Wine? Im thinking about trying it out and was wondering if its doable under Wine.

Also tried to get Star Wars: Empire at War running under Wine but im hitting the wall with that strange resolution issue where the game is pushed to the right of the screen and the resolution is way too big for what its supposed to be. Im thinking now about reverting to previous catalyst drivers to see if its a driver issue. Maybe Pharaoh and other games will run then.

Reading the Release thread it seems it's not playable under wine :( . Seems to be a vsync problem: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_star_wars_shadows_of_the_empire_8ee57/post184

That's not necessarily confirmed. :-)

I was the one that mentioned the game running at a really fast speed -- vsync was just a suggestion being bandied about.

what I've read online is that it's mostly vsync related. Most advice given is to use the video driver application to limit the vsync on this game.