Here I can cite my own answer from AskUbuntu:
Analysis
The WineHQ repository misses the dependencies for
wine-stable
package.
I have reported a bug 48513 to WineHQ bugzilla.The main problem here is bad documentation, which is written in non-reproducible way.
The problem with dependencies was caused by the FAudio dependency, which is not contained in Debian/Ubuntu and WineHQ repositories. We can determine the exact package name by using command below and analyzing of their output:
$ sudo apt-get install wine-stable-amd64 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: wine-stable-amd64 : Depends: libfaudio0 but it is not installable Recommends: libcapi20-3 but it is not going to be installed Recommends: libodbc1 but it is not going to be installed Recommends: libosmesa6 but it is not going to be installed Recommends: libsdl2-2.0-0 but it is not going to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
The aforementioned
libfaudio0
package is available only for Ubuntu 19.10 and upcoming 20.04 LTS.
Solution
We need to follow official WineHQ guide for Ubuntu partially:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 sudo apt update
Note: if you have WineHQ repository added - remove it with
sudo apt-add-repository -r 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main'
to prevent the mess of repositories and then proceed.
Then we need to add other repository from OpenSuse Build Service to get
libfaudio0
installed:wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/xUbuntu_18.04/Release.key -O Release.key sudo apt-key add - < Release.key sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/xUbuntu_18.04/ ./' sudo apt-get update
and only after this install one of WineHQ packages:
# Stable branch sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable #Development branch #sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel #Staging branch #sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-staging
as it looks very similar to the OP problem.