apart from the hint to use an maintained kernel: PlayOnLinux is rather dead, they claim to work on version 5 for years now, but apparently they make no progress and the current version didn’t get an update in quite some time now.
You should try Lutris instead, its much better maintained and offers basically everything that PoL offers, plus more.
Hi, dunno if it’s related but I found this on the old forum :
There are other threads like this on Google, maybe one will relate to your case. I remember having some issues with POL and wine some months ago, I was back then on Linux Mint or Ubuntu Budgie. There was one tinkering in .playonlinux directory, there was also a manual install of my executable, rather than letting POL do the install - and get stuck while creating the virtual disk.
I removed this files. Now I have a little change, when virtual disk starts being created wineconfig small and unresizable window being opened, but virtual disk creating still forever. I want to mention, I am creating new disk instead the old disk by erasing it, and also I am creating 64bit disk.
I tried to use 32bit and that works. Now Wine is able to create 32bit virtual disk, but programm that I want Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 is for 64bit, so I got error.
I tried one more time and wine threw the message that it needs wine-mono and wine-gecko packages, I installed them and all worked great for me. However I dissapointed about photoshop CC 2018 version, so ugly and uncomfortable and it requires additional hard work to make it stable, in short I think I will not use it.
Yeah I don’t get exactly how it works but if you directly try to install an exe with Wine, it will tell you to install Mono and Gecko. You do the same in POL or Lutris, Mono & Gecko again.
As if they shipped their own Wine.
Sometimes the Gecko/Mono pop-up appears directly, sometimes as you saw, it is stuck…
Just a guess, I’m too lazy to wiki-search, but perhaps a Gecko/Mono install by application.
I know that in POL/Lutris, you can install by example 3 WIndows exe with each a different version of Wine, in 32 or in 64bit.