14 DAY TRIAL // It doesn't look like Wine 3.0 will be released by the end of the year, as the development team decided to drop another RC (Release Candidate) milestone instead to fix more bugs.
Wine 3.0 RC4 is hopefully the last before the final release, and it includes a total of 12 bug fixes for various Windows apps and games, among which we can mention the Zoo Tycoon 2: Marine Mania demo (installer failed to work correctly), Call of Duty 4 (didn't start), and The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System (error message).
The BBC iPlayer Desktop client received a fix for an issue with the .desktop file, U-Center 8.11 GNSS evaluation software for automotive, mobile terminal and infrastructure applications no longer crashes when importing or exporting configuration files, and WinPolis 3.x game's "Buy CDs" editbox now automatically selects all.
Among other changes included in the fourth Release Candidate of Wine 3.0, we can mention that Richedit should now open large text files much faster, the stereo IMA ADPCM encoding should no longer produce a loud static noise instead of sound, and Wine 2.20 Bcrypt should now compile under older GNU/Linux systems.
Wine 3.0 expected to land in early 2018
FreeBSD support was improved as well in Wine 3.0 RC4, which also fixes Steam support by addressing a bug that would make steamwebhelper.exe crash with Wine Staging 2.21 due to failing of the NtQueryInformationFile component. Check out the full changelog below for more details on the fixes.
The final Wine 3.0 release is now expected to land in early 2018. Meanwhile, you can download the Wine 3.0 Release Candidate 4 source tarball right now through our website if you want to compile it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but please keep in mind that it's still a pre-release version.
Wine 3.0 promises new features like an Android driver for running Windows apps and games on Android-powered devices, Direct3D 11 support enabled by default for AMD Radeon and Intel graphics cards, AES encryption support on Apple's macOS operating system, Progman DDE support, and new a task scheduler.