14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine project proudly announced today the general availability of the Wine 4.0 release, a major version of the open-source software that lets Linux and macOS users install and use Windows apps on their computers.
Wine 4.0 comes about a year after the Wine 3.0 release, which was the first to introduce an Android driver to allow users run Windows apps and games on devices powered by Google's Android mobile OS, Direct3D 11 support by default for AMD Radeon and Intel GPUs, a task scheduler, as well as AES encryption support on macOS.
With Wine 4.0, the team continues to improve the free and open-source compatibility layer that allows Windows program to run on Linux and Mac computers, adding new features like support for the next-generation Vulkan graphics API, Direct3D 12 support, HiDPI (High-DPI) support on Android, and support for game controllers.
"The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 4.0 is now available. This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements," wrote the developers on the release announcement.
What's new in Wine 4.0
Of course, the Vulkan and Direct3D 12 support, as well as HiDPI support on Android are only the major highlights of the Wine 4.0 release, which is a massive update sporting lots of improvements, among which we can mention shell autocompletion, MP3 decoder, various UI enhancements, support for fetching detailed BIOS information on Linux, and support for the PNG image format.
The Multi-Threaded Command Stream feature is now enabled by default, and the OpenGL core contexts are also now used by default when available. The Direct3D 10 and 11 support received multi-sample textures and views, multi-sample resolves, support for 1D textures, per-sample fragment shading, depth bias clamping, depth clipping control, and more.
Numerous other areas of Wine received various smaller improvements, including graphics, kernel, desktop integration, networking, input devices, cryptography, text and fonts, audio, built-in applications, internationalization, IDL compiler, and more, all of which you can study in the full release notes. Meanwhile, you can download Wine 4.0 and compile it on your Linux or Mac PC.