14 DAY TRIAL // Coming hot on the heels of last week's Wine 2.3 development release, Wine Staging 2.3 is now available for those who fancy installing Windows applications and games on their GNU/Linux distributions.
As you might know, Wine Staging is a special fork of Wine that promises to offer gamers a unique feature called CSMT (Command-Stream Multi-Threading), which dramatically improves their gaming experience. So if you are serious about gaming on Linux and you want to play some Windows games, you need to install Wine Staging.
The Wine Staging 2.3 release is here to add some more improvements to the CSMT functionality, but nothing worth mentioning in the release notes. Additionally, it adds an ECB mode in the bcrypt component and ports various Direct3D 11 functions to the Direct3D 10 implementation, and fixes multiple issues reported by users.
Also includes all the features of the Wine 2.3 release
As with any new update of Wine Staging, the developers also ported all the goodies implemented upstream. Therefore, Wine Staging 2.3 comes with all the features of the Wine 2.3 release, including the Direct3D command stream enhancements, the extra Shader Model 5 instructions, as well as better underline rendering in DirectWrite.
The obsolete wineinstall script was removed from this release, and ODBC support was improved on 64-bit platforms. Wine Staging 2.3 also fixes numerous of the bugs that users reported since the previous release, those improving support for many popular Windows games and apps. Check out the official release announcement for more details.
You can download the Wine Staging 2.3 source tarball right now from our website if you fancy compiling the software on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, or install it directly from the official repositories. We also recommend reading our report on the Wine 2.3 development release to see which apps and games have been improved.