Few days ago the release of the new stable version of Wine 7.0 was announced which is positioned as a compatibility tool for running Windows programs on various *nix operating systems, offering greatly improved 64-bit compatibility.
In this new version the full job of 5156 is implemented (5049 a year ago) from programs for Windows was confirmed in Wine, 4312 other (4227 a year ago) programs work fine with additional settings and external DLLs. 3813 programs (3703 years ago) have minor problems that do not interfere with the use of the main functions of the applications.
Notably the improvements are numerous and Among the most important are included improved theme support for apps, better joystick support, HiDPI support, better compatibility with OpenCL, VKD3D 1.2, better Apple Silicon Mac support, new Plug and Play drivers, Unicode 14 support, an update to Mono, and improvements to WinRT.
In total, more than 9.100 modifications to give rise, in particular, to a new WoW64 architecture, now functional.
What's new in Wine 7.0?
One of the main novelties that stands out is that almost all DLLs have been converted to use the PE executable file format (Portable Executable) instead of ELF. The team adds that most modules have been converted to PE (Portable Execution) format. The rest will follow in future versions of Wine. Once the transition is complete, it will be possible to manage 32-bit applications using 64-bit libraries. The old 32 bits will then be removed.
The use of PE solves problems with the support of various copy protection schemes that verify the identity of system modules on disk and in memory.
Another of the improvements that stand out in Wine 7.0 is that WoW64 architecture has been implemented (32-bit Windows on 64-bit Windows) that supports running 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Unix systems.
With this WoW64 layers are prepared for most Unix libraries and allow 32-bit PE modules to access 64-bit Unix libraries. After the conversion of all modules to PE format is complete, it will be possible to run 32-bit Windows applications without installing 32-bit Unix libraries.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- The Vulkan driver implements support for the Vulkan Graphics API 1.2.201 specification.
- Support was provided for output via Direct2D's Hatched Geometric Objects API, with the ability to check for a click hit.
- The Direct2D API provides initial support for visual effects applied through the ID2D1Effect interface.
- The GStreamer plugins for DirectShow and the Media Foundation framework are combined into a common WineGStreamer backend, which should simplify the development of new content decoding APIs.
- Based on the WineGStreamer backend, Windows Media objects for synchronous and asynchronous reading are implemented.
- Support for the ID2D1MultiThread interface has been added to the Direct2D API, which is used to orchestrate exclusive access to resources in multithreaded applications.
- The WindowsCodecs library set supports WMP (Windows Media Photo) image decoding and DDS (DirectDraw Surface) image encoding.
- Removed support for image encoding in ICNS format (for macOS), which is not supported on Windows.
- Implemented support for themes. The composition includes "Light", "Blue" and "Classic Blue", which can be selected via the WineCfg configurator.
- Added the ability to customize the appearance of all interface controls through themes.
- Provided item view auto update after changing theme.
- Theme support has been added to all built-in Wine applications.
- Applications have been adapted to screens with high pixel density (High DPI).
graphics subsystem
How to install Wine 7.0?
Si are users of Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives if use a 64-bit version of the system, we are going to enable the 32-bit architecture with:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Now we are going to add the following to the system:
wget https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key
sudo apt-key add Release.key
sudo apt -y install gnupg2 software-properties-common
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo apt-key add winehq.key
sudo apt-add-repository https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/
We add the repository, for Ubuntu and derivatives:
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ '$(lsb_release -cs)' main'
sudo apt-get update
For Debian and eta-based distributions:
wget -O- -q https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/Debian_11/Release.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/Debian_11 ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wine-obs.list
Done this, We proceed to install the essential packages for Wine to run smoothly on the system:
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable
And we confirm the installation by executing:
wine-version
For the case of Fedora and its derivatives:
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/fedora/35/winehq.repo
And finally we install Wine with:
sudo dnf install winehq-stable
In the case of Arch Linux or any Arch Linux based distribution We can install this new version from its official distribution repositories.
The command to install it is:
sudo pacman -s wine