After six release candidates going back to early December, it looks like Wine 10.0 stable will be ready to ship this week. This is largely as expected with the annual Wine stable releases tending to come around mid-to-late January. Here’s a look at what’s ahead for this stable release for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.
Wine lead developer and maintainer Alexandre Julliard announced this weekend that the Wine 10.0 final release should be ready to ship in “a couple of days.” So with that, here’s a look back at all the interesting features to make it into the Wine 9.xx development builds over the past year in culminating with this imminent Wine 10.0 stable release. Wine 10.0 in turn should serve as the basis for Valve’s Steam Play (Proton 10.0) as well as updated versions of CodeWeavers CrossOver and other software.
– The Wine Wayland driver has matured quite well for having an initial usable experience for Windows software with Wine running natively under Wayland rather than relying on XWayland or an X11 session. This Wayland driver is enabled by default.
– More robust HiDPI support for modern high density displays. There is better scaling and all around better HiDPI support.
– There’s a new opt-in and experimental mode-setting emulation code path for emulating display changes rather than actually changing display settings. The emulated settings and more can be adjusted via a new Wine Desktop Control Panel applet.
– An opt-in FFmpeg-based multimedia backend as an alternative to GStreamer.
– An initial Bluetooth driver is working for Wine.
– Vulkan within Wine now supports through Vulkan 1.4.303 as well as Vulkan Video extensions and more.
– ARM64EC is now fully supported and similar to the existing ARM64 Wine support. Hybrid ARM64X modules are also fully supported.
– Mono 9.4 integration along with VKD3D 1.14, Capstone 5.0.3, and other updated library dependencies.
– Full Dvorak keyboard support.
– Initial process elevation support for processes running as a normal user by default but elevating to administrator access as needed.
Look for the Wine 10.0 stable release to take place in the coming days and here’s to hoping Proton 10 will begin seeing the light of day soon for enhancing Valve’s Steam Play Windows gaming experience.
