14 DAY TRIAL // Wine developers have just revealed that version 1.8 RC1 of their application has been released, which means that a new major stable version is just around the corner.
Just yesterday it was unveiled that Wine 1.7.55 was the last in the series and that a new 1.8 version was being planned. It looks like the first of many RC releases has been made available today and is now ready for download and testing.
The Wine project is evolving, and its makers are moving away from the regular development cycle. They now intend to release only a single stable version every year, and that is a really big change. It was announced a while back, and now they are finally getting around to it.
Wine 1.8 RC1 is ready for testing
This is just the first RC for branch 1.8, and the devs promised that there would be others. From the looks of it, this is only about small fixes and no big features will be added. The project is now in feature freeze.
Wine comes with changes to the following Windows games and tools: Leisure Suite Larry 7, Sea3D, Word95, various Telltale games, Mystery Cases, Sega Rally Revo, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, iMesh 7.x, World Of Tanks, Path of Exile, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Warframe, Crysis, Anno 1602, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Warhammer 40k, Age of Empires II Conquerors, Children of the Nile, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Planetary Annihilation, StarForce 3.x, and many others.
The new version of Wine won't show up in repositories anytime soon, so it's not really worth the wait, especially since it's going to be replaced in a short while by RC2 and so on. The stable version Wine 1.8 is expected to arrive by the end of the year.
More details about this release can be found in the official changelog. You can download Wine 1.8 RC1 source packages right now from Softpedia.