Straight from the WineHQ, we got to know that the newest Wine 5.4 development release is finally here, and it comes with many new features and bug fixes.
If Wine doesn’t sound familiar, allow FOSSLinux to introduce you to this handy software. Much to our surprise, Wine isn’t a software that keeps you up to date with the latest happenings in the alcohol industry.
Instead, the makers think of WINE as being short for ‘Wine Is Not an Emulator.’ What Wine does is provide users with a compatibility layer on which you can run Windows software on operating systems based on Linux, BSD, and macOS. The fact that this software relies on upon quickly producing POSIX calls from Windows API calls is what makes it more efficient in terms of performance and memory and sets it apart from other emulators in the game.
So, if we’ve got you invested in Wine, it’s about time we see what this update has in store for us.
What’s new in Wine 5.4
For sure, the main highlight of this release has to be that D3DX9 now supports text drawing, which means that decade-long suffering of various games not having text rendered has far finally come to an end.
This has only been possible because of the efforts of CodeWeavers, who were skilled enough to implement ID 3DXFont_DrawText in this Wine update. All thanks to this move, the users will be able to enjoy older games better.
Apart from that, it is also good to see that the built-in programs are now based on UCRTBase C run-time, and Unicode 13 has replaced the previous version.
Coming to the improved support of Wine 5.4, this update comes with better support for Internationalized Domain Names. Plus, it is now also possible to paint rounded-rectangles in Direct2D.
In terms of the bug fixes, the developers have incorporated 34 of them in total. Because of them, you’ll now find fewer bugs in different famous games such as Final Fantasy V, Bioshock 2, and Assassin’s Creed. There’s also good news for those using Discord as they can now more easily connect to voice channels, and several other apps also function better, including RPG Tkool, Foxit Reader 3.0, and ABBYY FineReader Pro 7.0.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for an emulate-, oh pardon me, a compatibility layer for running Windows-based apps, then you can’t go wrong with opting for the latest version of Wine. So, go ahead and download Wine 5.4 and install it on your Linux system.
