Wine 8.7 continues with Wayland improvements, vkd3d implementation and more

The release of the new experimental version of the open implementation of WinAPI- Wine 8.7 was recently announced. Since the release of version 8.6, 17 bug reports have been closed and about 228 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 8.7

In this new released version of Wine 8.7, few changes have been made (compared to previous releases) and that is that of the highlights mentioned in the announcement of this new version, it is the vkd3d component which implements an API to parse (vkd3d_shader_parse_dxbc) and serialize (vkd3d_shader_serialize_dxbc) DXBC binary data.

In addition to this, it is also highlighted that based on this API, calls are implemented d3d10_effect_parse(), parse_fx10_preshader(), d3dcompiler_get_blob_part(), d3dcompiler_strip_shader(), d3dcompiler_get_blob_part(), shader_extract_from_dxbc().

In addition, the PostScript driver continues to improve support for spool files that store data about a print job. It is also noted that the developers mention that they continue to work on adding full support for Wayland.

Of the other changes that stand out of this new development version of Wine 8.7

• Listview highlighting issues when drag and drop is enabled
• Fix in Street Fighter 4 Benchmark, with the flickering screen with parallel rendering enabled
• ReVolt 1207 had a crash when trying to play Stunt Arena
• Davar bible software was not working
• Airscout 1.2.0.5 program does not load in Wine 2.0.2
• Shapes On A Plane crashes on startup
• Unravel fails to load
• Wine server memory leak during HTTP download (Genshin Impact Launcher, Qt5)
• Fix several games fail to start (Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice GOTY, Dark Souls III)
• wininet:internet – test_InternetErrorDlg() fails on Windows 10 1607
•  Existing prefixes keep resetting to Win10 when wine is updated
• Final Fantasy XI Online: The opening movie does not play (redux part II).
• Conemu does not start (cannot attach to process

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 8.6 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