At the end there was no seventh Release Candidate, and the launch did not occur on a Friday either. It was launched yesterday, Tuesday, but the really important thing is that WINE 7.0 ya has arrived in the form of a stable version. Among its novelties, WineHQ highlights as few as when they release development versions every two weeks, but we will review the most striking that has arrived together with the seventh major update of the software to run Windows applications on other operating systems.
What WineHQ highlights as new highlights is that most modules have been converted to PE format, better theming support, with a theme included for a more modern look, vastly improved HID stack and joystick support and new WoW64 architecture.
WINE 7.0 highlights
- Conversion of many WINE components to Portable Executable (PE) format such as libraries for WineGStreamer, DNSAPI, Secur32, WPCAP, WinePulse, WinSock, IPHLPAPI, Shell32, WineBus, IPHlpApi, NsiProxy, WineDbg, MSXml, XAudio, DInput, mount manager, CoreAudio, and more.
- Support for theming for all WINE built-in programs. It has also added built-in “blue” and “classic blue” themes. Also on the theming front there is now proper scrollbar support as well as better HiDPI theming.
- HiDPI support for WINE embedded applications has been improved.
- An initial HID-based joystick backend was introduced, which matured last year to the point of being enabled by default.
- Updated compatibility with OpenCL 1.2.
- VKD3D 1.2 support as part of WINE's Direct3D 12 over Vulkan effort.
- Support for the Rosetta memory layout used in Apple Silicon / Apple M1 Macs.
- Improvements in plug and play driver support.
- Monkey 7.0.
- Support for loading libraries from architecture-specific subdirectories. The WINE build system has also been updated around support for architecture-specific directories.
- Work has begun on support for MSDASQL as the Microsoft OLE DB provider for Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers. MSDASQL allows you to access/connect to the different DBMS data sources offered by ODBC drivers from Oracle to Microsoft Access and more.
- All remaining math functions in the C runtime (CRT) were imported from the Musl libc C library.
- Implementation of more trunks from 32-bit to 64-bit and other WoW64 work.
- Unicode 14 support.
- Various improvements to WinRT.
- Hundreds of bug fixes.
Now available
The WINE 7.0 source code can now be downloaded from this and this other link. In the download page binaries and information to add the repository in distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu are available.