The stable version of Wine 7.0 has already been released and these are its news

After a year of development and 30 experimental versions, was presented the new stable version of the open implementation of the Win32 API Wine 7.0 in which about 9100 changes have been implemented.

Key achievements of the new version include the translation of most Wine modules in PE format, support for themes, stack expansion for joysticks and input devices with the HID interface, WoW64 architecture implementation to run 32-bit programs in a 64-bit environment.

Main news of Wine 7.0

In this new version almost all DLLs have been converted to use the PE executable file format (Portable Executable) instead of ELF. The use of PE solves problems with the support of various copy protection schemes that verify the identity of system modules on disk and in memory.

Besides it PE modules can interface with Unix libraries using the standard NT kernel system call, which makes it possible to hide access to Unix code from Windows debuggers and monitor the thread log.

All the Built-in DLLs are now loaded only if there is a corresponding PE file on disk, regardless of whether it is an actual library or a stub. This change allows the application to always see the correct link to PE files. You can use the WINEBOOTSTRAPMODE environment variable to disable this behavior.

Besides it WoW64 architecture has been implemented, which allows running 32-bit Windows applications in 64-bit Unix processes. Support is implemented through the connection of a layer that translates 32-bit NT system calls into 64-bit calls to NTDLL.

Added a new Win32u library, which includes parts of the GDI32 and USER32 libraries related to graphics processing and kernel-level window management. In the future, work will start on migrating driver components like winex11.drv and winemac.drv to Win32u.

On the other hand, it stands out new rendering engine (which translates Direct3D calls to the Vulkan graphics API) which was significantly improved. In most situations, the level of Direct3D 10 and 11 support in the Vulkan-based engine has been matched to the older OpenGL-based engine. To enable the rendering engine via Vulkan, set the Direct3D "renderer" registry variable to "vulkan".

Have been implemented many features of Direct3D 10 and 11, including lazy contexts, state objects running in device contexts, constant offsets in buffers, cleaning up messy texture representations, copying data between resources in untyped formats.

It is also highlighted that added support for multi-monitor setups, which allows you to select a monitor to display a Direct3D application in full screen mode. In rendering code via the Vulkan API, query processing efficiency has been improved if the VK_EXT_host_query_reset extension is supported by the system.

Added the ability to display virtual framebuffers (SwapChain) via GDI, if OpenGL or Vulkan cannot be used for display, for example when exporting to a window from different processes, for example in programs based on the CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) .

cards have been added AMD Radeon RX 5500M, 6800/6800 XT/6900 XT, AMD Van Gogh, Intel UHD Graphics 630, and NVIDIA GT 1030 based on Direct3D graphics cards.
The "UseGLSL" key was removed from the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D registry, instead of using "shader_backend" as of Wine 5.0.

Continued implementation of the Media Foundation framework, added support for IMFPMediaPlayer functionality, the sampler, improved support for EVR and SAR rendering buffers.

Removed wineqtdecoder library which provides a decoder for the QuickTime format (GStreamer is now used for all codecs)

Of the other changes that stand out:

• Added a new DirectInput backend for joysticks that support the HID protocol.
• The ability to use feedback effects on joysticks has been implemented.
• Improved joystick control panel.
• Optimized interaction with XInput compatible devices.
• WinMM moved joystick support to DInput instead of using the evdev backend on Linux and IOHID on macOS IOHID.
• Removed old winejoystick.drv joystick driver.
• New tests have been added to the DInput module based on the use of virtual HID devices and do not require a physical device.
• The C runtime implements a complete set of mathematical functions, which is mainly carried over from the Musl library.
• All CPU platforms provide correct support for floating point functions.
• Added support for the DTLS protocol.
• The NSI (Network Store Interface) service has been implemented, which stores and transmits information about routing and network interfaces on a computer to other services.
• WinSock API handlers, such as setsockopt and getsockopt, have been moved to the NTDLL library and afd.sys driver to match the Windows architecture.

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link

How to install Wine 7.0 on Ubuntu and derivatives?

For those who are interested in being able to install this new version of Wine, just open a terminal and type the following commands in it:

1. sudo apt install libgnutls30:i386 libgpg-error0:i386 libxml2:i386 libasound2-plugins:i386 libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libdbus-1-3:i386 libsqlite3-0:i386

2. sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
   wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key && sudo apt-key add winehq.key

3. sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ '$(lsb_release -cs)' main'

4. sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable