It's coming soon to a GNU/Linux distribution near you

Jan 21, 2020 18:50 GMT  ·  By

Big news today for Linux gamers and ex-Windows users as the final release of the Wine 5.0 software is now officially available for download with numerous new features and improvements.

After being in development for more than one year, Wine 5.0 is finally here with a lot of enhancements, starting with support for multi-monitor configurations, the reimplementation of the XAudio2 low-level audio API, Vulkan 1.1.126 support, as well as built-in modules in PE (Portable Executable) format.

"This release is dedicated to the memory of Józef Kucia, who passed away in August 2019 at the young age of 30. Józef was a major contributor to Wine's Direct3D implementation, and the lead developer of the vkd3d project. His skills and his kindness are sorely missed by all of us," reads today's announcement.

Improvements to Windows games

Wine 5.0 also brings improvements to numerous Windows games, so Linux gamers would be happy to learn that they'll be able to better enjoy Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Tomb Raider (2013), Tetris for Windows, The Five Cores, Far Cry 5, Sonic Mania, Serious Sam Classic, and The Witcher Enhanced Edition (GOG).

Furthermore, games like UFO: Extraterrestrials Gold, Skyrim (Steam), Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Emperor: Battle for Dune, The Old City: Leviathan, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Rayman Origins (UPlay), The Evil Within, X Rebirth, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Magic: The Gathering Arena, and the Battle.net app should also work a lot better with Wine 5.0.

Among the Windows apps that received improvements in Wine 5.0, we can mention Acrobat Reader 11, PDF Eraser 1.5, PDF-XChange Viewer 2.5.x, Exact Audio Copy, Express Rip, dbpoweramp CD Ripper, Adobe DNG Converter 11.2+, MindManager Pro 7.0, 7-Zip, ABBYY FineReader 14, Pale Moon, Foxit Reader 6.12, uTorrent 2.2.0, and Xara Photo Graphic Designer 2013 (8.1.1).

Wine 5.0 brings numerous other improvements and bug fixes that you can study on the official changelog. Meanwhile, if you like running Windows apps and games on your GNU/Linux distribution, make sure you update to Wine 5.0 as soon as it arrives in the stable software repositories. You can also download the Wine 5.0 source tarball if you want to compile it yourself.