Wine 8.0 Released with 8000+ Changes and Enhancements

A new release of Wine 8.0 is here with more compatibility with Windows apps and games.

After a couple of months of development, testing and RC phase, the Wine team announced the release of Wine 8.0 stable version. This major release brings several improvements over its predecessor to this Windows compatibility layer for UNix-based systems. Changes spread across exe, DLL support, 32-bit execution of apps, gaming performance improvements via Wine, input hardware controller support and many more.

Here’s a quick summary of this release.

Wine 8.0: What’s New

The key highlight of this release is the completion of portable executable (PE) module work after four years of development. This foundational change paves the way for future work of apps that uses copy protection, 32-bit apps running on 64-bit systems, Windows debuggers and X86 architecture apps running on ARM and many more.

The exe, dll file system calls now uses a special dispatcher for direct PE call to Unix call, bypassing the full NT system calls. This will improve performances in all areas, mostly in games.

In addition, the WoW64 implementation (running 32-bit apps in 64-bit system) is also complete for all Unix libraries. It will help to run the 32-bit exe (or dll calls) files in 64-bit system seamlessly.

You can now use the “Light” theme in the Wine configuration for a modern look of Wine.

Furthermore, the graphics drivers (winex11.drv, winemac.drv, wineandroid.drv) now run inside Unix as they are fully converted. Also, Direct2D via Wine now supports parsing of descriptions and several core objects.

In addition, here are some other key changes of Wine 8.0:

• Performance improvements in Direct3D module
• Direct3D Vulkan renderer supports setting multiple viewports and scissor rectangle
• The Direct3D graphics card database recognizes more graphics cards
• New HLSL compiler and disassembler are implemented using vkd3d-shader library
• The MPEG-1 audio decoder filter for layers 1 and 2 and the separate filter for layer 3 are
  implemented on top of GStreamer.
• Wine now supports digital network streams with asf video formats

A detailed changelog is present on GitLab.

Download and Install

If you have Wine installed from the official distribution repo, don’t try installing it on top of it. Instead, wait a few days for this version to arrive in Ubuntu, Fedora and other distribution’s main repo.

For manual installation, open a terminal and run the below commands:

Ubuntu 22.04

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key
sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/jammy/winehq-jammy.sources

sudo apt update
sudo apt install winehq-stable

Visit below page for other distributions and versions to get the installation instructions:

Via official announcement

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