The Wine team has announced the release of Wine 3.0. This comes after one year of development and comes with 6000 individual changes with a number of improvements and new features. ‘This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements’.
The free and open source compatibility layer, Wine lets you run Windows applications on Linux and macOS.
The Wine 3.0 release has as major highlights Direct3D 10 and 11 changes, Direct3D command stream, graphics driver for Android and improved support for DirectWrite and Direct2D.
New Features and Improvements in Wine 3.0
Direct3D
There are a significant number of changes on Direct3D 10 and 11 features. Some major changes include:
- Compute shaders
- Layered rendering to 3D textures
- Improved support for OpenGL core contexts in Direct3D as the core contexts can now be used by default for both Direct3D 10 and 11 on Intel and AMD graphic cards.
- More graphics cards are now able to be recognized by the Direct3D graphics card database.
Suggested readHow To Run Windows Applications On Linux [Beginners Guide]
Android Graphics Driver
For Android users and developers, Wine can now be built as an APK package that will behave like a real Android application. A full-screen desktop mode is now supported for Android as a full graphics driver has been implemented.
There is also a full audio support and a limited support for OpenGL (OpenGL ES API) with Direct3D not yet supported since it cannot run on OpenGL ES.
User Interface
The built-in mouse cursors can now work on high DPI screens with higher resolution.
Other changes and improvements include DirectWrite, support for D3DX 9, Internet and Networking, ARM platforms, Kernel and many others which can be seen in the Wine Announcement.
According to the announcement, ‘a number of features that are being worked on have been deferred to the next development cycle’ because they wanted to meet up with the annual release schedule. ‘This includes in particular Direct3D 12 and Vulkan support, as well as OpenGL ES support to enable Direct3D on Android’.
Install Wine 3.0
The Wine 3.0 source is ready for download meanwhile the binary packages for macOS and Linux distros will soon be available in their respective ‘download locations’, the release said.
I advise you to remove any existing version of Wine already installed on your system before installing the new version.
If you are looking for professional Windows software support on Linux, you can try CrossOver 17.
Have you tried the latest release of Wine 3.0? Share your experience with the rest of us by leaving a comment below.