MinGW and why Linux users should care

Nowadays in most cases Wine is mature enough to trade cross-compilation for the native compilation in the emulated environment. The drawbacks are slightly higher resource consumption, and of course the x86 architecture dependency. The gain is the easiness of the whole process. This is particularly nice with the Windows version of Qt, where you just install it under Wine and it just works there. And since you would probably run your freshly compiled application under Wine to test if it works or not anyway, why not compile it under Wine as well? Cross-compilation is nice for larger projects, but for the smaller ones Wine is just easier :)