If I had gambled, I would have lost my money. It is wise which WINE 8.0 it was close to arriving, since last year seven Release Candidates of v7.0 of this software were released to run Windows applications on other operating systems, but personally I thought it would arrive as early as February. It hasn't been like that. Today, January 24, WineHQ has released the new stable version, and it comes with a long list of new features.
WineHQ notification is available at this link, where things are explained such as that, after 4 years of development, the conversion to PE has already been completed. As they explain, "This is an important milestone on the way to support for various features such as copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers, x86 applications on ARM, etc.«.
WINE 8.0 highlights
- Completion of the conversion of all WINE modules to the PE format.
- Continued work on WoW64 to ultimately allow 32-bit Windows applications to work without a 32-bit Unix library.
- A “light” graphical theme has been added to the default settings.
- The print processor architecture has been implemented.
- Ongoing improvements around Direct2D and Direct3D functionality, including performance optimizations.
- The VKD3D shader library has implemented a new HLSL compiler and disassembler.
- Controller hot plug support has been greatly improved.
- Better support for steering wheel device detection, Force Feedback, and other input functions.
- Font handling improvements.
- Mono engine upgrade to Mono 7.4.
- All embedded apps use Common Controls v6 for default HiDPI rendering and theming.
- Various updates to the build infrastructure and development tools.
- Updates to many of the libraries included in WINE.
The WINE 8.0 tarball is available at this link. From now on, the different Linux distributions will add the new version to their official repositories; Let's not forget that this is the stable version and not another development version. The development ones will begin to arrive shortly to prepare WINE 9.0 that should arrive at the beginning of 2024, first one every two weeks, then one weekly in the Release Candidates phase, then the stable one and start again.