14 DAY TRIAL // Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.7.36 is now out and comes with quite a few improvements and new features, not to mention the fixes for various applications and games that have been added.
The common belief among users is that Wine is an emulator, but that is not actually the case. In fact, Wine is an acronym for Wine is not an emulator. It's considered to be a compatibility layer, much in the same way you will find compatibility settings in modern Windows systems for older ones. It still requires a powerful system to overcome the inherent performance penalty, but that's not really a problem.
There are two Wine branches at any given time, one stable and one in development. If your desired applications are working just fine with the stable release, which is pretty old, there is no reason to switch to the development one. If the apps or games don't work, then you can try the development version, which has a pretty high success rate, despite the fact that it's not a stable one.
Wine 1.7.36 is not disappointing
Many of the new features reported for this release are actually for the Mac OS X platform, but there are plenty of other smaller fixes for Linux users. They will be happy to see that more apps and games have been given Linux support.
The devs say that users can now configure speakers from the options, some new typographic features have been made available in DirectWrite, the support for the Mac OS X Trash folder is now much better, and some 64-bit support for Mac OS X has been implemented, although it's in the preliminary stages.
The list of supported games and apps has expanded with the following titles: Youtube Downloader, Adobe Reader 8.1, Office 2003/2007, EA Origin, Imperial Glory, Windows 8 consumer preview setup, Windows Live Essentials 2012, Uru Complete Chronicles, Evernote, CheatEngine 6.4, PostgreSQL 9.3 VBScript, ASUS PC Link, Medieval 2: Total War, and many more.
How to install the latest version of Wine in Ubuntu
Users can get Wine 1.7.36 from the source code, but Ubuntu users can install it from a PPA. Just enter these commands in a terminal (root access is required):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine