LinuxMusicians

See: https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Wineprefixes

Essentially it's a directory structure with a set of registry files and it's where you install your windows programs. You can have several of them, which is useful if you need different dll overrides etc. The default prefix is ~/.wine, but by using an environment variable you can store the prefix wherever you want. Also note that all programs installed into a prefix share the same wineserver and ought to be able to communicate, while apps installed into different wineprefixes are separated from each other. Normally it works fine to copy wineprefixes around too, so it's useful for making backups.

I see. It enables having several wine installations. It could perhaps be that the prefix is altered only to run some binaries with a specific wine version while other binaries are using another.

Cheers.

Well it allows to make different overrides, say maybe you want to install vcrun2010 into a prefix to be able to run something, which would break something else. With 2 prefixes this would not be a problem. Running different wine versions in tandem is a bit harder. I've heard that Play On Linux can do that. You could also build several wine versions manually and run them from scripts, but this would probably get messy real quick