14 DAY TRIAL // The development of branch of Wine, 1.7.x, has been updated by the developers and is now available for download and testing. As usual, this is where the action happens and there are quite a few improvements that make this a very important update.
Wine 1.7.28 is part of the development branch and it's the place where all the interesting changes and fixes are gathered before the launch of a stable iteration. This is usually the recommended branch for new releases on the Windows platform, although some of the fixes are for very old Windows applications.
The stable branch of Wine has the advantage of being much more reliable, but it's only recommend for proven applications. If a game or an app doesn't work with this release, then 1.7.x is necessary.
What's new in the latest Wine
The last couple of Wine versions have been really small and that can only mean one thing, a bigger and stable release is on its way. Many of the fixes implemented in the latest dev iteration are added at the request of the community, but it looks like the makers or Wine are putting the finishing touches on it.
The new version has two kinds of changelogs, as usual. The main one is about the new features and modifications made to Wine and the second one is about various fixes that have been added for Windows apps and games. The developers have explained that support for conditional compilation in JavaScript has been added, bidirectional text support in DirectWrite is now available, and the work for DirectPlay Voice support has been started.
A list of applications and games that should work better with Wine 1.7.28 is also available: FileMaker Pro 11, Irfan, CDBurnerXP, Steam, QuickBooks Premier 2011, Rhapsody 4.0, SolidWorks 2014, ToDoList, Pale Moon Portable, ApexDC, and Excel 2010.
These are just a few of the fixes that have been reported for this version, but users should find the complete changelog quite interesting.
Where to get the latest Wine
The developers normally provide the source package for each release, but some repositories will actually integrate it. If you have an Ubuntu system, a PPA is available. You can get the dev branch of Wine by entering these commands in a terminal (you will need to be root):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine