Thats a bug of apt... There should be an apt fix-my-system command that just looks at the state of everything, and figures out how to get everything back towards a working system.

And make sure it keeps a log of everything it did so it can be rolled back if it doesn't work as promised.

Aptitude does total fix-my-system. I have tried it several times. The suggested fix is always: remove everything and then reinstall the broken package. It does not even try to reinstall those packages it has just destroyed.

apt -f install

I never broke a Debian install beyond repair, and I've used it for a couple of decades. Even when doing some really off the charts stuff, including powering off a system mid dist-upgrade. Apt is really really solid and well documented/community supported.

Then community-solve this:

    $ sudo aptitude install wine-stable

--- 5 pages of useless garbage removed and then:

    62)     wine32:i386 [Not Installed]

    Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
    65)     wine64 recommends wine32 (= 3.0-1ubuntu1)

    Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] 

In other word the suggested solution is: Do not install wine

    sergio@sergio-laptop:~ > sudo apt-get install wine
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree... Done
    Reading state information... Done
    The following additional packages will be installed:
        fonts-liberation fonts-wine libcapi20-3 libodbc2 libosmesa6 libwine libz-mingw-w64 wine64
    Suggested packages:
        odbc-postgresql tdsodbc ttf-mscorefonts-installer q4wine winbind winetricks playonlinux wine-binfmt dosbox exe-thumbnailer | kio-extras wine64-preloader
    Recommended packages:
       wine32
    The following NEW packages will be installed:
       fonts-liberation fonts-wine libcapi20-3 libodbc2 libosmesa6 libwine libz-mingw-w64 wine wine64
    0 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 15 not upgraded.
    Need to get 105 MB of archives.
    After this operation, 700 MB of additional disk space will be used.
    Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 

No need to overcomplicate things by going multi-arch.

I found a better example. Only solution aptitude ever gives is not to install paprefs. Please solve that.

    $ sudo aptitude install paprefs
    Keep the following packages at their current version:
    ...
    11)     paprefs [Not Installed]                            
    ...
    Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]

Don't know your install, but Debian by default uses Pipewire, not Pulseaudio. If you are using Pipewire, indeed you can't install a Pulseaudio application. That's expected.

You can replace pipewire with pulseaudio. It's doable, just not trivial enough for an HN comment. In general, you'd have to force removal of pipewire without removing all dependent packages, install pulseaudio and then have apt check that all dependencies are ok. Then, having Pulseaudio in the system, you can install paprefs, a Pulseaudio application.

As I said, it's a solid system, rather impossible to break into an unrecoverable state.

But do you then get Wine that is capable of running 32-bit Windows binaries? Or can Wine do it nowadays without?

There's work to do that since 8.0. Current version is 8.4 but I haven't been following, don't know the status. There's a HN thread about the 8.0 release with 201 comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34505239