14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine development team announced the availability of a new development release of the open-source and cross-platform application that lets Linux and Mac users install and use games and apps made only for Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Wine 2.3 is now the newest development release, the third of its kind after the release of the major Wine 2.0 stable series earlier this year. Prominent features include improvements to ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) support on 64-bit platforms, more Shader Model 5 instructions, and additional work on the Direct3D command stream.
Other than that, it looks like the underline rendering was improved in DirectWrite and the deprecated wineinstall script has been finally removed. Of course, numerous bugs reported by users since previous development releases have been addressed. According to the release notes, a total of 41 issues are patched in Wine 2.3.
Here are the Windows apps and games that received improvements
Among the Windows apps that received improvements in Wine 2.3, which means they should work without hiccups, we can mention Putty 0.60 (also a native Linux app), Microsoft Word 2007, Poedit 1.7.4, Audacity 2.1.0, Malwarebytes, Zoner Photo Studio 18, 3DMark2001 SE, SPG-Verein 3.2, Kontact 5.6, ComputeMark 2.1, Acid Pro Trial 7.0e, and SteuerSparErklaerung 2017.
On the other hand, Wine 2.3 makes the Cultures 3 (multiplayer improvements), Revenant (missing polygons on 3D objects and crashes), Tera Online, StarCraft II (main menu issues), Necropolis, Mortal Kombat X (needs msvcr110.dll._get_dstbias), Final Fantasy V (crashes), S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (crash on startup), Final Fantasy XI Online (crashes), The Witcher 3 (hangs), and Kholat (hangs) games work better.
The full list of changes with all the 41 resolved issues is attached below for your reading pleasure. You can download the Wine 2.3 source tarball right now from our website if you want to compile and install it on your GNU/Linux distribution, but you should know that this is a pre-release version, albeit not suitable for use as your daily driver. The Wine 2.3 development release should also pop up in the testing repos of your Linux OS.