The Vulkan wrapper received various improvements

Oct 18, 2016 23:10 GMT  ·  By

Today, October 18, 2016, the Wine Staging development team announced the availability for download of a new version of their Wine Staging open-source alternative to the popular Wine software.

Based on the recently released Wine 1.9.21 development build, Wine Staging 1.9.21 promises a bunch of goodies for those interested in running the latest Windows games and applications on their GNU/Linux operating system, among which we can mention improvements to the Vulkan wrapper.

Furthermore, an initial version of the GIF encoder was implemented in the windowscodecs component, there's support for METHOD_OUT_DIRECT ioctls, queued xaudio2 AL buffers are now automatically ignored after Stop, and it looks like the SetFileCompletionNotificationModes feature is now available for running Steam's Web browser in Windows 7 mode.

"The SetFileCompletionNotificationModes improvements make it possible to use the Steam Webbrowser in Windows 7 mode on Linux," explain the Wine Staging developers in today's release announcement. "You still need to pass -no-cef-sandbox as parameter to Steam though."

Also shipping with all the Wine 1.9.21 enhancements

Apart from the unique improvements mentioned above, which only Wine Staging uses will get if they update to today's 1.9.21 release, the new version is shipping with all the Wine 1.9.21 enhancements too, including the initial version of the HID minidriver, support for lists in the RichEdit control feature, as well as system tray improvements.

Both Wine 1.9.21 and Wine Staging 1.9.21 are now available for download via our website, as sources that need to be compiled for your GNU/Linux distro, so we recommend that you update to the new versions as soon as they land in the stable repositories of your favorite operating system. Installation details and Wine Staging 1.9.21 binaries for Mac OS X are available here.