Wine 5.0 Released: Improved Support For Windows Games And Apps

Wine is a reliable savior that makes it possible to run many Windows applications on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Ubuntu at native speed without slowing down the system. Now, its stable version Wine 5.0 has been released.

After a year of effort, with over 7,400 individual changes, Wine 5.0 arrives with major improvements such as Direct3D and XAudio2 reimplementation, and Vulkan 1.1 and Multi-monitor support.

Wine 5.0: What’s new?

Recently, end of support for Windows 7 has largely encouraged the Linux developers to speedup various OS or app development to lure Windows users as much as they can, who are looking for its alternative OS platform.

Wine offers the advantage of all the strong points in Unix (such as stability, flexibility, remote administration) while using the Windows applications you want, on the Unix-based platform.

Hence, for rendering better performance to the gamers, Wine 5.0 uses high-performance system clocks to reduce the overhead in many games. Game controllers are better supported, including hat switch, wheel, gas and brake controls.

For a better image, graphics come with support for multiple display adapters and monitors, including dynamic configuration changes. D3DX includes various fixes, to provide additional graphics functionality on top of Direct3D.

Also, Wine 5.0 reimplements the XAudio2 libraries to use the external FAudio library and sound driver support for better compatibility and per-channel adjustment.

Moreover, application update also becomes easier with Microsoft Installer (MSI) patch files support — that contains all the information required to update the application along with .msu update files installation by the WUSA tool (Windows Update Standalone Installer).

You can read more features listed in the release notes. You can download the Binary packages of Wine 5.0 from here.