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.
hardpenguin Jan 24, 2023
QuoteWoW64 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.That is an insanely good objective.
Happy release! Happy upgrades! 😌✌️
Last edited by hardpenguin on 24 January 2023 at 3:49 pm UTC
fenglengshun Jan 24, 2023
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.
What a journey it has been...
I've been making small but significant progress in making roughly 95% of my games work flawlessly in Linux so far, and I hope this is another big milestone toward my goal: 100% of my games working in Linux (my expectation is by the end of the year 2024 as long as I don't buy any more non-Linux-native games).
Most problematic are cutscenes blackscreen hang, AntiCheat, and empty font rendering.
WayneJetSki Jan 24, 2023
Quoting: syylkDo you remember when we were barely able to run Wordpad on WINE?
What a journey it has been...
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.
32-bit on 64-bit sounds good! Especially if it will work also for OpenGL / Vulkan parts.
I wish someone would also make the same thing for native Linux games.
Last edited by Shmerl on 24 January 2023 at 8:54 pm UTC
Geamandura Jan 24, 2023
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me