The new version also brings 64-bit app support on macOS

Jan 24, 2017 22:02 GMT  ·  By

It's finally here! After so many months of development and hard work, during which over 6,600 bugs have been patched, the Wine project is happy to announce today, January 24, 2017, the general availability of Wine 2.0.

Wine 2.0 is the biggest and most complete version of the open-source software project that allows Linux and macOS users to run applications and games designed only for Microsoft Windows operating systems. As expected, it's a massive release that includes dozens of improvements and new features, starting with support for Microsoft Office 2013 and 64-bit application support on macOS.

"This is the first release made on the new time-based, annual release schedule. This implies that some features that are being worked on but couldn't be finished in time have been deferred to the next development cycle. This includes in particular the Direct3D command stream, the full HID support, the Android graphics driver, and message-mode pipes," reads today's announcement.

Highlights of Wine 2.0

Highlights of Wine 2.0 include the implementation of more DirectWrite features, such as drawing of underlines, font fallback support, and improvements to font metrics resolution, font embedding in PDF files, Unicode 9.0.0 support, Retina rendering mode for the macOS graphics driver, and support for gradients in GDI enhanced metafiles.

Additional Shader Model 4 and 5 shader instructions have been added to Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 implementation, along with support for more graphics cards, support for Direct3D 11 feature levels, full support for the D3DX (Direct3D Extension) 9 effect framework, as well as support for the GStreamer 1.0 multimedia framework.

The Gecko engine was updated to Firefox 47, IDN name resolutions are now supported out of the box, and Wine can correctly handle long URLs. The included Mono engine now offers 64-bit support, as well as the debug registers. Other than that, the winebrowser, winhlp32, wineconsole, and reg components received improvements.

Support for HID devices is in place thanks to a new driver architecture, as well as support for loading multiple kernel drivers inside the same user-mode process. Check out the changelog below for all the juicy details, and download Wine 2.0 right now from our website. We expect Wine Stating 2.0 to be released shortly after this announcement.

Wine 2.0 Changelog