Wine is a reimplementation of the Win16 and Win32 application programming interface for Unix-based operating systems.
The release of the new experimental version of open implementation Wine 8.4. Since the release of version 8.3, 51 bug reports have been closed and 344 changes have been 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 8.4
In this new development version of Wine 8.4, one of the main novelties that stands out is that the main package includes initial support for using Wine in environments based on the Wayland protocol without the use of XWayland and X11 components.
At the current stage, added winewayland.drv driver and unixlib components, and preparations were made for processing files with Wayland protocol definitions by the build system. In one of the next releases, they plan to include changes to enable output in the Wayland environment.
It is mentioned that once the changes are complete in the main Wine package, users may use a pure environment of Wayland with support for running Windows applications that do not require X11-related packages to be installed, enabling better gaming performance and responsiveness by removing unnecessary layers.
Another of the changes that stands out is the improved support for IMEs (Input Method Editors), as well as better use of global variables.
Regarding the corrections, it is mentioned that fixed crashes when running test functions test_enum_value(), test_wndproc(), test_WSARecv(), test_timer_queue(), test_query_kerndebug(), test_ToAscii(), test_blocking(), test_wait(), test_desktop_window(), test_create_device(), test_setvalue_on_wow64(), as well as passing tests like gdi32:font, imm32:imm32, advapi32:registry, shell32:shelllink, d3drm:d3drm, etc.
While in the part of the closed bug reports related to games it is mentioned: Thief, Hard Truck 2: King of The Road, Amazon Games, Secondhand Lands, SPORE, Starcraft Remastered and from the closed bug reports related to the applications: foobar2000 1.6, Motorola Ready For Assistant, ldp.exe.
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 8.4 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