Wine 9.16 released with more Wayland work and an initial Driver Store implementation

The Wine 9.16 development release is now available for this compatibility layer to run Windows apps and games on Linux. Here's all that's changed. Reminder: Wine is a huge part of what makes Valve's Proton able to do its thing so you can play lots of games on Linux Desktop and Steam Deck.

The main highlights of this release include:

• Initial Driver Store implementation.
• Pbuffer support in the Wayland driver.
• More prototype objects in MSHTML.
• Various bug fixes.

For those curious about this Driver Store looking it up on Microsoft's website they explain it as:

Starting with Windows Vista, the Driver Store is a trusted collection of inbox and third-party driver packages. The operating system maintains this collection in a secure location on the local hard disk. Only the driver packages in the Driver Store can be installed on a device.

When a driver package is copied to the Driver Store, all of its files are copied. This includes the INF file and all files that are referenced by the INF file. All files that are in the driver package are considered critical to the device installation. The INF file must reference all of the required files for device installation so that they are present in the Driver Store. If the INF file references a file that is not included in the driver package, the driver package is not copied to the store.

The process of copying a driver package to the Driver Store is called staging. A driver package must be staged to the Driver Store before the package can be used to install any devices. As a result, driver staging and device installation are separate operations.

A driver package is staged to the Driver Store by being verified and validated.