Needs aforementioned tweaks with winetricks and winecfg to get background music up and running. Otherwise game runs perfectly even with Roses and Wine + Ragnarok mods.

In particular, for those like me who stumble upon issues regarding quartz.dll when installing directmusic:

• Open the winetricks script in a editor (sudo $(which winetricks))
• Comment the line w_call quartz in load_directmusic()

This should skip installing quartz (which seems not necessary to FF8) and proceed the rest of installation normally.