On December 10, when the first Release Candidate, we remember that, in this phase of development, WineHQ usually releases a new RC every week. With that idea in mind, the second one should have arrived last Friday, but it did not. One might think that, since they are doing things differently lately, maybe they would wait two weeks, but neither. Yesterday Wednesday they launched WINE 8.0-rc2.
What they are also not doing as in past releases is leaving their information article rather empty, saying only that in this phase of development they only fix bugs. Yes they say so in the highlights, but below have facilitated a list with 50 bugs fixed, and a total of 134 changes. Everything is to contradict those of us who took it for granted that we were going to see the same thing as in years past.
WINE 8.0 will arrive in early 2023
Among the corrections that have been introduced in WiNE 8.0-rc2 we can highlight some that improve game support like Unreal Tournament, Silent Hill 2, World of Warcraft, Resident Evil 7, Serious Sam, among others.
WINE 8.0-rc2 available from this link. In the download page there is information on how to install this and other versions on operating systems such as Debian and Ubuntu, but it can also be installed on Android and macOS.
One thing is clear. At this stage of development, WineHQ, unless it decides to let me down, won't take as long to release RCs as it did for development builds. If what they decide is to return to what would be considered normal, because that is what they have done in past years, WINE 8.0-rc3 It should arrive on Friday, December 30, but being on the dates in which we are, nothing is guaranteed either.
As for the stable version, it will arrive at the beginning of 2023, but it is not clear if it will be at the end of January or at the beginning/mid of February. When they decide to deliver it to us, they will start preparing the 2024 version, releasing a new development version every two weeks.