Wine 6.8 Is Released With 35 Bug-Fixes

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The latest Wine Is Not An Emulator Windows API re-implementation supports the Map object in JavaScript, libraries are now installed into architecture-specific subdirectories and there are 35 application-specific bug fixes for games and applications like Stone Giant, Age of Empires II, Fifa 11 and Diablo 1.

written by 윤채경 (Yoon Chae-kyung)  2021-05-09 - last edited 2021-05-09. © CC BY


The Phosphorysation demo scene demo by Amnesty recorded in Wine 6.8 at 1080p 30fps.

Wine lets GNU/Linux users run a lot of Windows software at near-native speeds, but there's still a very long way to go until you can open any random piece of Windows software in Wine and expect it to "just work". Wine 6.8 is another development release with small steps towards full Windows compatibility.

Wine 6.8 has 18 commits to the wined3d DirectX to OpenGL translation layer, support for the map object in JavaScript applications implemented by Jacek Caban, 35 commits to the widely used ntdll library, a new implementation for msv1_0 written by Hans Leidekker and 35 code commits to the user32 library mostly contributed by Rémi Bernon.

A total of 35 different people contributed to the Wine 6.8 release. Nine of the top ten were employees of the Codeweavers corporation.

The game and application specific fixes in Wine 6.8 include a fix for GroupMail 5.x crashing at startup, a fix for missing menu options in Explorer++ and Double Commander, a fix for graphical glitches in Crysis Wars, a fix for a crash on startup with Qvodplayer 3.5, a crash for the FIFA 11 fifaconfig configuration tool, a crash fix for Fiablo 1, a "out of memory" fix for Royal Quest, a fix for a startup crash in Solid Edge 2021 and a fix a crash in Star Citizen.

You still can't use it to play Mario Kart DX12 (available from itch.io) or run PC scene demos like Fr-063: Magellan and Freon with Wine 6.8, and you can't run most DirectX 9 software like Fr-041: d e b r i s and Quantum without using an alternative DirectX 9 implementation add-on like Gallium Nine or DXVK.

DirectX 9 seems to be an area where Wine's wined3d DX to OpenGL implementation has some severe shortfalls, most DX9 software fails with Wine 6.8 (and earlier versions) if you use it's built-in wined3d implementation yet the majority of the DX9 software we tried works just fine with both the Gallium Nine and DXVK add-ons. The Unigine products Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 and Unigine Valley Benchmark 1.0 demonstrate that the wined3d weakness is mostly DX9-specific. Both of those Unigine benchmarks offer a choice between DX9, DX11 and OpenGL. Wine 6.8 will happily run both of them without a hitch if you choose DX11 or OpenGL, yet both fail of you try to run them with DX9.

Wine still has a very long way to go before you can throw any random piece of Windows software at it and expect it to magically work as good at it does natively on Windows operating systems.

You can acquire the source code for Wine 6.8 from dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/ if you want to compile it yourself. A likely better option is to go to wiki.winehq.org/Download where you can find binary packages for Debian (Buster/Bullseye), Ubuntu (18.04 to 21.04), Fedora (33 and 34) and macOS (10.8 to 10.14).

You can learn more about Wine at the Wine website at winehq.org and you can learn more about the CodeWeavers corporation who makes it at www.codeweavers.com. They are hiring so you could get a job there if you have "strong C" skills and you're looking for work.

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Anonymous (12a22c64)

31 months ago
Score 1

With Wine you should remember one thing: its bug fixes often has zero relationship to the version being released. They are just closed in time for a release.

// b.
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Anonymous (fa8e57bc)

31 months ago
Score 0

The biggest problem with wine for me is the lack of comfort in installing libraries that either come with Windows or are very commonly installed(visual c/c++ runtime, dotnet etc.) Winetricks tries to take care of this but it takes a very long time to install a new dotnet package as it will go through each version one by one. It often gets stuck somewhere, spouts meaningless warnings etc., it's not a nice experience.

Installing these libraries make a lot more things "just work" on wine, but it is really a pain to do so.
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Anonymous (ce03dcd8e7)

29 months ago
Score 0
wine 6.12 is now out
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