Today, the Wine Project officially released Wine 5.0 as stable for the Linux, macOS, Android (limited support), and FreeBSD platforms. The announcement comes after a year of development by the Wine team comprising bi-weekly development releases.
For those unfamiliar with Wine (Wine is Not an Emulator), it is a FOSS compatibility layer that allows users to run computer programs like computer games and application software on Linux platforms, and more recently, macOS platforms, too. Wine was first released in 1993, over 26 years ago.
Wine 5.0 will bring a smile to the faces of many devoted Linux users in the gaming community.
What’s New In Wine 5.0?
This latest release focuses primarily on a plethora of graphics and audio improvements designed to increase performance in gaming on Linux. Also, in Wine 5.0 are over 7.400 bug fixes.
Other improvements include:
- Vulkan 1.1 support
- FAudio integration
- Direct3D graphics improvements
- Multiple user interface updates
- Built-in modules in PE (portable executable) format
- Improved game controller, and other hardware, support
- Multi-monitor support
- XAudio 2 re-implementation
- Numerous other enhancements and improvements
- Passport HTTP redirects support
- MSI (Microsoft Installer) patch files support
- Video4Linux version 2 library now used
- And a multitude of other updates and fixes
Much of the improved gaming support in Wine 5.0, through the efforts of CodeWeavers and funding by Valve for their development on the Wine-based Proton service that allows the Linux Steam client to run many more Windows games than was previously possible.
Interested Linux users can get the Wine 5.0 source from:
Alternately, the Wine 5.0 source is also available from the Wine git repository.
Binary packages for various Linux distros, including Fedora, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Android, and others, will soon be available from www.winehq.org/download.
Conclusion
This release will bring a smile to the faces of many devoted Linux users in the gaming community. With the help of WeaveCoders and Valve, Wine makes Linux machines a viable alternative for die-hard gamers for 2020.
The Wine developers dedicated the Wine 5.0 release to the memory of Józef Kucia, a significant contributor to Wine’s Direct3D implementation and the vkd3d project lead developer. Kucia passed away in August of last year at just 30 years old.
Current plans for the Wine project include the projected release of Wine 6.0 in early 2021.
4 comments
This SITE SUCKS!!!!! Where the HELL do you download??? STOP with all the BULLSHIT on the page and show the download buttons!!!!
Well, basically you just need to go on Google and type in “wine” in the search bar, it should be the first page. Not that hard. But, in case you can’t find it use URL http://www.winehq.org.
Thanks, I thought it would be rude of me to send him to lmgtfy.com!
Take care,
Travis
Well, good afternoon to you, too, D Elms! Thanks much for your kind words. Rarely do we get feedback on our site and almost never with such colorful language. I’m glad you enjoyed the article.
With that said, FOSS Linux is not a “download site”. Rather, we provide Linux and FOSS related news and information to our readers along with helpful tips and techniques, Linux distro and FOSS reviews, tutorials, and a host of other content.
We don’t host software on our server(s). Instead, when we cover a topic that has software or a Linux distro available for download, we normally provide a link to the development teams official download page at the article’s conclusion.
Again, thanks ever so much for stopping by FOSS Linux and for your feedback. I’m glad you enjoyed your visit. Please visit us again.
Take care and long live Linux,
Travis