14 DAY TRIAL // Wine devs have announced that a new version of their application is out and it comes with some very interesting features, including improved support for the 64-bit platform.
Wine is still a very sought-after application on the Linux platform, despite the fact that many developers have started to port their apps and games to Linux. It will remain relevant as long as their is a Windows OS, so it's not really going anywhere. If anything, the development of Wine has been speeding up in the past few months, and proof of that is the high number of releases.
The developers are no longer pushing stable versions of Wine out the door, and it's been more than a year since the previous iteration, but that's not really a problem. These updates that have been landing are only for the dev version, but it seems to be very stable, and it's the one used and recommended by everybody. It's true that you won't find it by default in some repos, but you can always install it.
New games and apps are now supported
Each new Wine release brings some major changes, such as better ARM support, null device kernel object support, an initial version of a SmartTee filter, and more. And, then there are all the other small fixes for various games and apps.
Wine 1.7.44 features fixes for the following Windows games and tools: Wizardry 8, Desperados, Blood 2: The Chosen, Adobe Acrobat Pro 7, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, Total Commander 8, Neverwinter Nights, Death to Spies: Moment of Truth, Evernote 5.4, Skyrim, Jade Empire Special Edition, Strong Bad's Cool Game, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, GOG Galaxy client, League of Legends, and Sigil Portable.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.7.44 source packages right now from Softpedia. It's possible to compile the package by yourself, but there are quite a few dependencies, and it will take a while.