14 DAY TRIAL // Wine (Wine is not an emulator) 1.7.53 has been released and is now available for download. It comes with an array of improvements and changes, among other things.
Even if the Wine developers have announced a clearer schedule for the stable branch of the application, it doesn't mean that we won't still get all of these wonderful development releases that are essential for running Windows games and apps. The variables on Windows are always changing, and Wine developers need to adjust all the time.
It's also worth pointing out that Wine devs are also working to implement support for DirectX 11, but that will take some time to finish. They have made some progress, but it's not conclusive and it will be a while until it is ready. One thing is sure, it won't happen in 2015.
Wine 1.7.53 is ready for download
The developers say that support for the various versions of Xaudio has been added, more implementation of the Web Services DLL has been done, OLE object embedding has been improved, code cleanups in Direct3D have been made, and the MAINTAINERS file and Signed-off-by requirement have been added to improve the patch review process.
The list of supported games and apps has expanded with the following titles: Tomb Raider III, Gamestudio A7, Lost Planet 2, many DirectX10+ games, Cypress PSoC Designer, Adobe Illustrator, Happy Foto Designer 5.4, Photoscape 3.6.3, PhysX, Etrom: The Astral Essence, Torrents Downloader, Amazon Cloud Player, Battle.net, .NET 2.0/3.x/4.X, The Silent Age, From Dust, Watchmen: The End is Nigh, Blazing Angels Squadrons of WWII, Saw: The Video Game, and Intel MPI.
How to install the latest version of Wine in Ubuntu
Users can get Wine 1.7.53 from the source code, but Ubuntu users can install it from a PPA (it might take a while until it hits this repository). Just enter these commands in a terminal (root access is required):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine