Wine 2.0 is now available

Wine 2.0 is the most recent version of the popular compatibility layer for operating systems such as Mac OS X, BSD, and for Linux.

What it allows you to do is run -- some -- Windows programs on those devices. This is excellent for users who switched from using Windows on their machines to Linux or Mac OSX, but want to use certain programs only available for Microsoft Windows.

I ran the excellent KeePass password manager for Windows for instance on Linux back in the days using Wine.

Wine 2.0 is the newest version of the compatibility layer that introduces plenty of new and improved features.

Wine 2.0

Highlights of the new Wine 2.0 release are support for Microsoft Office 2013 and 64-bit support on Mac OS. The release notes list support for "many new applications and games" on top of that, but does not go into detail or list them individually. So, if you ran into compatibility issues with programs or games before, Wine 2.0 may resolve those and it is worth checking that out.

Some of the highlights of the Wine 2.0 release are:

• Implementation of additional DirectWrite features.
• Window, bitmap and GDI DC render targets are implemented in Direct2D.
• Mac OS graphics driver supports Retina rendering mode.
• Support for display resolutions such as 640x400 and 1280x960 supported in desktop mode.
• Additional Direct 3D 10 and 11 features implemented.
• Support for additional graphics cards added.
• GStreamer version 1.0 support for audio and video.
• Web Services API is supported.
• Uninstallation support in MSI improved.
• Loading multiple kernel drivers inside the same user-mode process is supported.

The Wine team notes that Wine 2.0 is the first release of the new annual release schedule of Wine. One effect of the new release schedule is that some features could not be included in the release because they were not ready for release.

This includes in particular the Direct3D command stream, the full HID support, the Android graphics driver, and message-mode pipes.

These features have been deferred to the next development cycle. Release numbering has changed as well. New stable releases will be numbered 2.0.1, 2.0.2 and so on, while development releases 2.1, 2.2 and so on. The next major stable release will be Wine 3.0.

The Wine 2.0 source code is already available, binary downloads will be provided on Wine HQ's official download site.