14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine 2.9 development release was announced today for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X users who want to run Windows games and apps on their personal computers.
Coming about two weeks after the release of Wine 2.8, which improved support for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III that'll be ported to Linux and SteamOS platforms by Feral Interactive on June 8, Wine 2.9 is here to introduce support for tesselation shaders in Direct3D, binary mode support in WebServices, RegEdit UI improvements, and clipboard changes detected through Xfixes.
However, as with any new Wine release, numerous apps and games received improvements. Among the Windows games that have been improved in Wine 2.9, we can mention The Witcher 3, Need for Speed: The Run, Grandia II, World of Warships, World of Warplanes, World Of Tanks, Tomb Raider 2013 (Steam), 1nsane (GOG), Way of the Samurai 4, League of Legends, Banished, and Soul Reaver (GOG).
The Testament of Sherlock Holmes and GT Challenge received fixes
The Rise of the Tomb Raider, GT Challenge, FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn, The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, and WAtomic games were improved as well, along with the GOG.com and Battle.net installers, as well as various uPlay games. Explorer++, Acoustica Mixcraft 6, WeChat, Terragen 4, and GMATPrep 2.4.323, and the Avast Antivirus are among the Windows apps that received attention in Wine 2.9.
The Wine 2.9 source tarball can be downloaded right now from our website if you fancy compiling it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version not suitable for production use. We recommend installing the stable Wine branch if you want to have a reliable and bug-free experience. Wine 2.9 will also be installable from the software repos of your operating system in the coming days.