14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine development team announced a new maintenance release to the stable 1.8.x series of the open source software project that lets Linux users run various Windows games and apps on their computers.
Coming hot on the heels of Wine 1.9.20 and Wine Staging 1.9.20, Wine 1.8.5 is now available, and while there aren't any new features implemented, it attempts to address quite a lot of bug fixes reported by users since the previous stable update, namely Wine 1.8.4. According to the release notes, Wine 1.8.5 includes no less than 58 changes improving support for many popular Windows applications and games.
Among the Windows apps that received improvements in Wine 1.8.5, we can mention Windows Movie Maker 2.x, Microsoft Publisher 2007, Microsoft Publisher 2010, Microsoft Relog, PDF Factory 3.x, PDF Factory 4.x, EasyPal August 6 2012, SmartMusic 2012, SmartMusic 2014, Nikon Capture NX 2.4, ArchiCAD 16, and Microsoft Word and Excel 2010.
Additionally, there are improvements for the PlotSoft PDFill 10, UltraISO, sdb2xml, PhysX 9.15.0428, ZaraRadio, Saturn PCB Design Toolkit 6.86, Lego Mindstorms EV3, UFile, Linksys USB Wireless Adapter Installer, VMWare, Regedit, GOG Galaxy, Battle.Net Launcher, Hauppauge Capture, CPU-Z, 3DMark03, and MiTeC System Information X apps.
The Nvidia GeForce GT 740M graphics card is now correctly recognized
Wine 1.8.5 also brings various bug fixes for some Windows games, among which we can mention Unreal Tournament 3, Age of Mythology: Extended Edition, Cabal II, Alien Shooter, When Monster Strikes, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux, Borderlands (Steam), Far Cry 4, and some CAPCOM games using gamepads.
Last but not least, Wine 1.8.5 makes the Nvidia GeForce GT 740M graphics card to be correctly recognized, and improves support for the TASCAM US-16x08 soundcard controller. You can download the Wine 1.8.5 sources right now via our website or update via the stable repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution.