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Wine development release 5.17 is out now

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Another two weeks have gone by and the team hacking away on the compatibility layer Wine have a brand new development release available.

Need to know what Wine is? Here's a quick primer: it's a constantly improving compatibility layer that allows the running of Windows-only applications and games on Linux and other operating systems. It's one of the driving forces behind Steam Play Proton. Helping you to get whatever you need done on Linux, or perhaps so you don't have to give up that favourite game.

September 11 saw the release of Wine 5.17. The release highlights include:

  • ADVAPI32 library converted to PE.
  • Beginnings of an NDIS network driver.
  • Still more restructuration of the console support.

They also noted 17 bug fixes. Solving issues either with this release or previously for: Deadlight: Director's Cut, Chrome / Chromium, World of Tanks, Risk II, Visual Studio 2019, Motocross Madness 2, The Sims Complete Collection and more. Full release notes here.

If you need help running multiple versions, Lutris is good for that. You can also get help in our Forum any time.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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13 comments

fagnerln Sep 12, 2020
Woah... Motocross Madness! That's (g)old, I played a lot when I was a teenager, it's funny.

What custom build of proton do you recommend? ProtonGE slowed the releases, and I want to try newer versions of wine.
Whitewolfe80 Sep 12, 2020
Woah... Motocross Madness! That's (g)old, I played a lot when I was a teenager, it's funny.

What custom build of proton do you recommend? ProtonGE slowed the releases, and I want to try newer versions of wine.

I recommend using lutris and running any version of wine you like on whatever game you want and chances are there is a more recent script to overcome issues.
Avehicle7887 Sep 12, 2020
Unfortunately no mfplat tests this weekend, something changed in the mfplat staging patches and refuses to compile on my system.


EDIT:

Wine Staging 5.17.2 has been released with 2 patches which allow compiling and compatibility on older distros. I'll see if I can get some tests up and running


Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 13 September 2020 at 1:34 pm UTC
AciD Sep 13, 2020
Getting more games to work is great, and I thank all the contributors to the Wine projet.
However I think the priorities needs to be redirected.
Instead of supporting all the newest games, Wine should focus on solving every single annoyance that _still_ keeps happening with the old versions of Microsoft Office 2010 or 2013. This should be Wine if not Codeweavers priority in my humble opinion.

If you want to convert enterprises to Linux, MSOffice is unfortunately a must-have, and therefore efforts should be made to make it run 100% flawlessly; ten years and MSO 2010 still has some rough edges that makes it sometimes unusable or very buggy, hence not usable in a professional environment (and MSO 2013 crashes pretty often or just does not work great).

I'm always stumped to see the latest AAA games runs at 120fps while the wildly more used office 2013 still can't do basic stuff without crashing/being unresponsive :(

tl;dr: Instead of improving some new games that will be use by a few number of users, Wine and Codeweavers should focus their effort on supporting apps that are wildly used in the professional world like MS Office, so that more user could switch over to Linux while still being able to continue working with the tools their company chose.


Last edited by AciD on 13 September 2020 at 11:54 am UTC
Faalagorn Sep 13, 2020
IS there an easy way to see what libraries are PE and what are not? I see more and more being converted and I wonder what's left ;)
Avehicle7887 Sep 13, 2020
As a follow up from the mfplat tests of 2 weeks ago ( Link ). The Wine 5.17 tests are here:

Shadow Warrior 2 (CUSTOM ENGINE) - Videos still broken.
Darksiders Warmastered Edition (CUSTOM ENGINE) - Videos still broken.

Unfortunately no change yet since the previous release.

As a reminder - The purpose of my tests I are for testing in game videos using the Windows Media Foundation framework without any additional workarounds or files borrowed from Windows.

For the next Wine release I'll have a few new games I never tried before.


Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 13 September 2020 at 3:40 pm UTC
Xaero_Vincent Sep 13, 2020
Getting more games to work is great, and I thank all the contributors to the Wine projet.
However I think the priorities needs to be redirected.
Instead of supporting all the newest games, Wine should focus on solving every single annoyance that _still_ keeps happening with the old versions of Microsoft Office 2010 or 2013. This should be Wine if not Codeweavers priority in my humble opinion.

If you want to convert enterprises to Linux, MSOffice is unfortunately a must-have, and therefore efforts should be made to make it run 100% flawlessly; ten years and MSO 2010 still has some rough edges that makes it sometimes unusable or very buggy, hence not usable in a professional environment (and MSO 2013 crashes pretty often or just does not work great).

I'm always stumped to see the latest AAA games runs at 120fps while the wildly more used office 2013 still can't do basic stuff without crashing/being unresponsive :(

tl;dr: Instead of improving some new games that will be use by a few number of users, Wine and Codeweavers should focus their effort on supporting apps that are wildly used in the professional world like MS Office, so that more user could switch over to Linux while still being able to continue working with the tools their company chose.

Businesses aren't likely to rely on software that isn't officially supported by it's vendor. For instance, running Office in Wine isn't supported by Microsoft. Its better to run this sort of software in a Windows virtual machine.

Plus there are a ton of Office alternatives for Linux that claim excellent Office file format support, including commercially supported ones like Only Office and SoftMaker.
t3g Sep 13, 2020
I wonder what version of WINE the Proton team will use next, considering the latest version is based on 5.9
Avehicle7887 Sep 13, 2020
I wonder what version of WINE the Proton team will use next, considering the latest version is based on 5.9

Hmm, that's interesting to know (I don't use Proton), a lot of stuff has changed after that version (such as not being able to apply esync using just the wine mainline code + staging). Also some 32bit games tend to crash for me at launch using the latest 5.1x builds (Risen 2, Darksiders 1).

I've been sticking with Wine 5.9 myself for now, I only use more recent builds to run tests but not actually using them for everyday gaming.
bingus Sep 14, 2020
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Businesses aren't likely to rely on software that isn't officially supported by it's vendor. For instance, running Office in Wine isn't supported by Microsoft.

This is true, plus Office 2010/2013 are quite old and a bit of a security issue now. I work for a non profit, and they recently made the switch from 2013 to Office 365. We've been through the whole process of justifying why it should be done.
DebianUser Sep 14, 2020
Getting more games to work is great, and I thank all the contributors to the Wine projet.
However I think the priorities needs to be redirected.
Instead of supporting all the newest games, Wine should focus on solving every single annoyance that _still_ keeps happening with the old versions of Microsoft Office 2010 or 2013. This should be Wine if not Codeweavers priority in my humble opinion.

If you want to convert enterprises to Linux, MSOffice is unfortunately a must-have, and therefore efforts should be made to make it run 100% flawlessly; ten years and MSO 2010 still has some rough edges that makes it sometimes unusable or very buggy, hence not usable in a professional environment (and MSO 2013 crashes pretty often or just does not work great).

I'm always stumped to see the latest AAA games runs at 120fps while the wildly more used office 2013 still can't do basic stuff without crashing/being unresponsive :(

tl;dr: Instead of improving some new games that will be use by a few number of users, Wine and Codeweavers should focus their effort on supporting apps that are wildly used in the professional world like MS Office, so that more user could switch over to Linux while still being able to continue working with the tools their company chose.

I think if you support new softwares only, in some years "all" will be supported but old things.
If you put work on old things, in some years you will have some recent softwares not supported, and very old things supported but nobody will use that anymore.
For example, in 5 years, MS-Office 2013 will have 12 years.
At this time, i prefer having all (or as much as possible) 5 years old software working trought wine than having Office 2013 Working, especially if you are considering that MS-Office is a must have, we can expect that features present in last version are a must have too ?
AciD Sep 15, 2020
OnlyOffice and Softmaker can claim what they want to sell their product, but so far none of the spreadsheet softwares around is on par with Excel 2003 (yes, you read that right, that software from 17 years ago).

As for old softwares, you'd be surprised how many enterprises still runs old office versions today...just because:
- it works,
- it does not require a always-online account to use,
- they already bought it and it was not a subscription,
- Excel for instance did not add any major feature to Excel since 2010 (except the recent LET() function a few months ago, which is huge) (And between 2003 and 2010, only the addition of the table object was a pretty big feature...so not much, and not much that the average user will ever use anyway)
- and most of their employees only uses 10% of the software features and clearly does not need the latest thing.

Again, it's not about the age of a software, but about how many people are (still) using it.

i prefer having all (or as much as possible) 5 years old software working trought wine than having Office 2013 Working
The problem here is the definition of 'working'. Right now Excel 2003, 2013, and 2016 are 'working' under Wine, but with some major flaws for experts users. I'd prefer having an 12 years old Excel 2013 software that works like it is supposed to in all cases, than having all the 5yo softwares segfault on 10% of their features.
Comandante Ñoñardo Sep 15, 2020
I wonder what is the Steam Linux Runtime SOLDIER
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