Wine 2.0 is here. After over a year of development and over 6,600 changes, Wine 2.0 has been finally released. The biggest highlights of this release are support for Microsoft Office 2013 and 64-but support for MacOS (whatever that means).
What is Wine again?
If you don’t know already, Wine (recursive abbreviation for Wine Is Not Emulator) is a free and open source software that provides a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Linux and MacOS.
If you are curious about how to use it, please follow this detailed guide on using Wine in Ubuntu (and other Linux).
Wine 2.0 features
Some of the main highlights of Wine 2.0 are:
- Support for Microsoft 2013
- Support for 64-bit on MacOS
- Improvement for gaming support with Direct 3D 10,11 and fixed on DirectX
- Updated Gecko engine
- Better support for Persian and other right to left languages
- Better HiDPI scaling
- Support for Unicode 9.0
You can refer to this release note for the full list of changes in Wine 2.0.
Install Wine 2.0 in Ubuntu
Wine 2.0 will be rolled out to official repositories of your Linux distribution eventually. Most probably Arch Linux users will get it sooner than rest of us.
But for Ubuntu and other Ubuntu based Linux users, there is an official PPA available that you can use.
Open a terminal and use the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine-stagingDownload Wine 2.0 for other Linux distributions
For Ubuntu and for other Linux distributions as well, there are packages available to download and install Wine 2.0. Just visit this page below and get the required download files:
Honestly, I have almost never used Wine. I prefer the native Linux applications.
Do you use Wine to install Windows applications on Linux? What do you think of Wine 2.0? Does it excite you enough to upgrade or download it? Do share your thoughts.