Wine is a reimplementation of the Win16 and Win32 application programming interface for Unix-based operating systems.
Several days ago the release of the development version of "Wine 7.18" was announced, version that since the release of the previous version 7.17, 20 bug reports closed and 252 changes made.
For those who do not know about Wine, they should know that this is a popular free and open source software which allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. To be a bit more technical, Wine is a compatibility layer that translates system calls from Windows to Linux and uses some Windows libraries, in the form of .dll files.
Wine is one of the best ways to run Windows applications on Linux. In addition, the Wine community has a very detailed application database.
Main new features of the development version of Wine 7.18
In this new version of Wine 7.18 that is presented, it is highlighted that the pertinent work has been carried out to add macOS driver support for WoW64, which is basically a Windows subsystem built to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. So, thanks to these drivers, users using Wine on macOS can now have access to a host of 32-bit apps and video games.
Another change that stands out in this new version is that character tables have been updated to the Unicode 15.0.0 specification and which adds 4489 new characters, bringing the total count to 149 characters. Among the new characters are 186 new emojis.
In addition to this, this new development version of Wine 7.18 presents an update to support for storing sessions with MSHTML which improves the startup speed of some applications. This software component is required to run 32-bit software based on the MSHTML engine for multi-item read and write operations in the computer's memory.
It is also noted that problems with asynchronous reading were fixed in the implementation of GStreamer support.
In terms of closed bug reports related to game performance the following titles are mentioned: Hotel Giant 2, Gas Guzzlers Combat Carnage, Cube World, Resident Evil 7
Regarding closed bug reports related to the operation of applications: Visual C++ 2015-2019, FileMaker Pro 12-19, MyDiff, Clip Studio Paint, Intel ACAT, Adobe FrameMaker 8, Bloomberg Terminal, Dosbox, KeePassXC, Framemaker.
Finally if you want to know more about this new development version of Wine released, you can check the registry of changes in the following link.
How to install the development version of Wine 7.18 on Ubuntu and derivatives?
If you are interested in being able to test this new development version of Wine on your distro, you can do so by following the instructions we share below.
The first and most important step will be to enable the 32-bit architecture, that although our system is 64-bit, performing this step saves us many problems that usually occur, since most of the Wine libraries are focused on 32-bit architecture.
For this we write about the terminal:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Now we must import the keys and add them to the system with this command:
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key sudo apt-key add Release.key
Done this now we are going to add the following repository to the system, for this we write in the terminal:
sudo apt-add-repository "deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get --download-only install winehq-devel sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-devel sudo apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade
Finally we can verify that we already have Wine installed and also what version we have in the system by executing the following command:
wine --version
How to uninstall Wine from Ubuntu or some derivative?
As for those who want to uninstall Wine from their system for whatever reason, They should only execute the following commands.
Uninstall the development version:
sudo apt purge winehq-devel sudo apt-get remove wine-devel sudo apt-get autoremove