14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine project is going through some important changes, and they were announced a while back. Following the release of the previous 1.7.55 version, the Wine project is now preparing for the launch of the 1.8 branch.
The Wine development cycle was changed a couple of months ago, and it was established that the current model was not working anymore. Users hadn't received a stable version for a long time, and a development one that everyone was using was being pushed out every week.
Now, the developers have just revealed that Wine 1.7.55 was the last in the 1.7.x branch and that it will be followed by 1.8 by the end of the year. The plan is to have a single stable version once a year, but it remains to be seen how this will work out for them.
Wine 1.8 is coming soon
It might sound like good news, but until we have a chance to try the new model, we can't really say anything about whether it's right or wrong. What we do know is that Wine 1.8 has been announced, and it's coming in just a month or so.
"1.7.55 is the last Version of the 1.7.x series. It's likely to see Wine 1.8 until end of this year. Until then we'll have weekly release candidates. Please give them as much testing as you can, you're also welcome to improve translations in case your language isn't perfect yet," wrote the developers in their most recent newsletter.
This is not a surprise, but a stable release once a year will provide some much-needed predictability for the project. Even if games and apps are being ported all the time for Linux, it doesn't mean that Wine is not needed anymore.
As a side note, the Wine developers have recently also reported that they managed to port the framework on Android, which is a great step forward, but they don't see a way of making money off that just yet.