Wine 7.7 is out with more PE conversion work and theme additions

Wine is the compatibility layer that allows you to run games and applications developed for Windows - on Linux (plus also macOS and BSD). A new biweekly development release is out now with Wine 7.7.

It's a major part of what makes up Steam Play Proton and enables a ton of games to work on the Steam Deck. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.

Here's what they listed as the highlights in Wine 7.7:

• More progress on the PE conversion of the X11 and OSS drivers.
• Support for UTF-8 as default Ansi codepage.
• Theming support for control panel applets.
• Various bug fixes.

Since it's sometimes asked: the continued conversion of various modules to PE is another change that will gradually increase compatibility in many ways over time for certain expected behaviour needed by Windows applications. Previously Wine has built its Win32 libraries (like DLLs and EXEs) as ELF but for many reasons (like better compatibility) they've started to move them over to use PE instead.

They only noted 11 bugs were found to be solved as of this release including issues with Anno 1602 / 1602 A.D., Steam and other miscellaneous issues.