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Wine 2.0 Released (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Softpedia: It's finally here! After so many months of development and hard work, during which over 6,600 bugs have been patched, the Wine project is happy to announce today, January 24, 2017, the general availability of Wine 2.0. Wine 2.0 is the biggest and most complete version of the open-source software project that allows Linux and macOS users to run applications and games designed only for Microsoft Windows operating systems. As expected, it's a massive release that includes dozens of improvements and new features, starting with support for Microsoft Office 2013 and 64-bit application support on macOS. Highlights of Wine 2.0 include the implementation of more DirectWrite features, such as drawing of underlines, font fallback support, and improvements to font metrics resolution, font embedding in PDF files, Unicode 9.0.0 support, Retina rendering mode for the macOS graphics driver, and support for gradients in GDI enhanced metafiles. Additional Shader Model 4 and 5 shader instructions have been added to Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 implementation, along with support for more graphics cards, support for Direct3D 11 feature levels, full support for the D3DX (Direct3D Extension) 9 effect framework, as well as support for the GStreamer 1.0 multimedia framework. The Gecko engine was updated to Firefox 47, IDN name resolutions are now supported out-of-the-box, and Wine can correctly handle long URLs. The included Mono engine now offers 64-bit support, as well as the debug registers. Other than that, the winebrowser, winhlp32, wineconsole, and reg components received improvements. You can read the full list of features and download Wine 2.0 from WineHQ's websiteS.
I remember when Wine 1.0 was released. It was quite a surprise, as Wine was one of the classic programs famous for never reaching version 1.0 despite working well and being extensively deployed for many years. NASM hit 1.0 around that time too, if I recall correctly. Vista had been released not long before that, and the following year Enlightenment E16 hit 1.0 too. Weird times... people began thinking that Duke Nukem Forever might end up getting finished and released after all.
i'm seriously contemplating buying a mac book, I would love nothing more than to be able to dump MS completely since Win10.
Working at Microsoft and having a job of making Linux apps play on Windows would be kinda cool, because Linux has a reasonably small set of system calls (OK, we're not talking dozens anymore, its more like hundreds) and the overall userspace/kernel interface is well designed and explained in a number of good books.
Trying to make Windows apps play on Linux is an Sisyphean/Augean Stables type task, because the Windows API was designed to be horrendously difficult to copy (by OS competitors), and hard for application competitors (like Netscape, Lotus, or WordPerfect) to keep up with. If API's had 15 arguments each of which was a complicated struct, so much the better in the thinking of the MS Windows honchos.
As Steve Jobs put it: "They (Microsoft) have no taste."