Wine 8.0 is out now, a big improvement over the last stable release with many upgrades for Windows to Linux compatibility across thousands of games and apps. This is part of what makes up Steam Play Proton, the compatibility used on Steam Deck to run Windows games.
One of the major changes here is the conversion to the PE format for various modules. This format is used by Windows, and an important milestone for Wine to increase compatibility with copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers and more. Work is still to be done though to finish it properly, as some modules still need to be properly converted.
The Wine developers say they also implemented a "special syscall dispatcher", to avoid the overhead of a full NT system call to minimise the performance impact.
WoW64 was upgraded too, and once the final PE work is done, they say it will then be "fully possible" to run 32-bit Windows applications without needing 32-bit libraries. This is no doubt something many are looking forward to.
Lots of Media Foundation fixes and improvements too that should help audio and video issues across many apps and games, Direct2D upgrades, lots of optimizations for Direct3D and newly supported Direct3D 10 and 11 features are in, better steering wheel support, big improvements to controller hotplugging, better force feedback support, better support of DualShock and DualSense controllers, better support for CJK fonts and so on.
Absolutely lots more you can see in the release notes.
Hopefully later this year Proton will see a full upgrade to the latest Wine release, to give us even more improvements for gaming on Steam Deck and Linux desktop.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I was playing Warcraft III in 2002 with Wine and World of Warcraft in 2004. I think it has come a long way, though, it was already a great project even in the early 2000s.Yup, I was thinking of mid-90s, actually, when I was using it to run some WfW3.11 simple programs and more often than not, it wouldn't find some obscure DLL library.
Also, Blizzard (or rather - the Blizzard of old, the patriarchal but competent one) always had a great track of releasing WINE-friendly software, or at least cleanly coded for OpenGL.
Shmerl 25 Jan 2023
Read what you wrote again. Are you really not seeing the similarities with arguments told over the years on why you should not use Debian stable?
No, but I'm not going to waste time repeating the explanation.
Geamandura 25 Jan 2023
Does that mean these changes will also come to proton or is this wine only?
Proton is downstream from Wine so yes all the Wine improvements flow at various intervals of Valve's choosing down into Proton, no worries.
tpau 26 Jan 2023
I was playing Warcraft III in 2002 with Wine and World of Warcraft in 2004. I think it has come a long way, though, it was already a great project even in the early 2000s.
WoW without DXVK still looks kind of funny , even these days
Hopefully with the next cycle they can improve their default rendering. Games like Mafia 3 are pitch black :)
KohlyKohl 26 Jan 2023
I was playing Warcraft III in 2002 with Wine and World of Warcraft in 2004. I think it has come a long way, though, it was already a great project even in the early 2000s.
WoW without DXVK still looks kind of funny , even these days
Hopefully with the next cycle they can improve their default rendering. Games like Mafia 3 are pitch black :)
I haven't played since 2005 but back then you would use the OpenGL version and not DirectX. I thought it looked right but I didn't have Windows to compare it to.
slaapliedje 26 Jan 2023
Well now, that should be in time for Ubuntu 23.04. Wonder if it'll make it to Debian 12 since we haven't yet passed the Soft Freeze deadline.WineHQ have their own Debian Repositories for current versions of wine. Though they are occasionally built a little weird, but overall do work great (if you've never installed wine from the Debian repos).
I'm glad for all the improvements for CJK and media playback. As someone who plays a lot of Japanese games, I'll take every improvements for them because good lord can those Japanese games can be very messy to run with a whole mess of dependencies to play videos, have fonts rendered well, and sometimes just to get running.
A massive thanks for all the people involved and congrats on the new release, here's hoping for a good 2023 for Wine and related projects.
fenglengshun 29 Jan 2023
WineHQ have their own Debian Repositories for current versions of wine. Though they are occasionally built a little weird, but overall do work great (if you've never installed wine from the Debian repos).Oh, yeah, I tried that when I was trying out MX Linux, but for some reason it kept failing to pull from the repo, `sudo apt update` would just keep saying error for those repo but the other repos are fine.
I don't know if it's my connection (as sometimes we even have issues downloading from github - and there was a time where I couldn't connect to github at all without a VPN) but it is part of the reason why I haven't tried Debian and Debian-based again. There were a few issues that was confusing me, and I don't know if it's my device, my connection, or just something I couldn't figure out.
Shmerl 29 Jan 2023
Oh, yeah, I tried that when I was trying out MX Linux, but for some reason it kept failing to pull from the repo, `sudo apt update` would just keep saying error for those repo but the other repos are fine.
That happens if you use "testing" for Debian. It only works with named ones like bullseye.
SynchroAnarchy 30 Jan 2023
slaapliedje 31 Jan 2023
I remember back in 2018 when i moved to Linux, wine version was 3.xx i believe, no media foundation, no fsync, time surely flies by...Ha, yeah it took a very long time to hit 1.0, I first used Wine when it could barely launch Notepad.
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