What is the .exe File Extension?
.exe is the file extension of an executable file on Windows, which may be an application or other program. More specifically, the format is called Portable Executable, abbreviated PE.
How do I Open an .exe File?
Because .exe contains a program in it, you don't need another program to open it. You can just double click the .exe and it will open the program contained within it.
How do I Open an .exe on Linux or macOS?
You need WINE or Bottles and some luck.
Quotes
It's common knowledge that Windows NT has a VAX® VMS® and UNIX® heritage. Many of the Windows NT creators designed and coded for those platforms before coming to Microsoft. When it came time to design Windows NT, it was only natural that they tried to minimize their bootstrap time by using previously written and tested tools. The executable and object module format that these tools produced and worked with is called COFF (an acronym for Common Object File Format). The relative age of COFF can be seen by things such as fields specified in octal format. The COFF format by itself was a good starting point, but needed to be extended to meet all the needs of a modern operating system like Windows NT or Windows 95. The result of this updating is the Portable Executable format. It's called "portable" because all the implementations of Windows NT on various platforms (x86, MIPS®, Alpha, and so on) use the same executable format. Sure, there are differences in things like the binary encodings of CPU instructions. The important thing is that the operating system loader and programming tools don't have to be completely rewritten for each new CPU that arrives on the scene.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms809762(v=msdn.10) (accessed 2025-04-05)