Wine 4.0 Released With Vulkan Support, Initial Direct3D 12 and Better HiDPI (phoronix.com)

Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: Wine 4.0 is now officially available as the new annual stable release to Wine for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other operating systems. Following seven weekly release candidates, Wine 4.0 was ready to ship today as judged by Wine founder Alexandre Julliard. Wine 4.0 is a big release bringing initial Vulkan graphics API support, Direct3D CSMT is enabled by default, early Direct3D 12 support via VKD3D, continued HiDPI work, various OpenGL improvements, multi-sample D3D texture support, 64-bit improvements, continued Android support, and much more. The release announcement and notes can be read via WineHQ.org. The source can be downloaded here.

Comments

The real question

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

The real question is "how well does it actually work" with mainstream Windows programs like Word/Excel, Photoshop, etc.

I use VirtualBox to run Win7 under Linux Mint, and while some stuff works great, a lot of stuff doesn't.

For example, I can use MS Word under VirtualBox and most things work fine, but do something like update the Table of Contents and *boom* Word crashes.

So...is Wine better, or is Crossover a viable solution?

(I'd happily dump Word/Excel in a heartbeat, but the fact is that some of my clients use Word and they're not gonna change. I need to be able to send them a file that they can use.)

Re:The real question

[Gavagai80]

Have you actually ever had a problem with Word files saving wrongly in Libre Office? If so, have you tried saving them to an older version Word format?

Re:The real question

[bill_mcgonigle]

For example, I can use MS Word under VirtualBox and most things work fine, but do something like update the Table of Contents and *boom* Word crashes.

There's probably something wrong with your Word or Windows (or out of memory, etc.). That combination should "just work" - it's really running on Windows on virtualized hardware.

WINE contains no Windows; it's a reimplementation of the Win32API, etc. Stuff may or may not work depending on completeness and for bug-for-bug compatibility reasons (check their database).

Re:The real question

[Kjella]

I use VirtualBox to run Win7 under Linux Mint, and while some stuff works great, a lot of stuff doesn't. For example, I can use MS Word under VirtualBox and most things work fine, but do something like update the Table of Contents and *boom* Word crashes.

Well, first off does it crash on a native Win7 box? If it doesn't I'd try doing a fresh install, in this scenario VirtualBox is running genuine Windows on virtualized hardware. If that didn't work properly it'd be front page news. Quite frankly that setup is almost always less hassle than WINE, the obvious downside is that you need a license for the Win7 box while WINE is a re-implementation so it's just your code running on top of WINE.

This is awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really excited to see all the work in the Linux world generally on Wayland and GPU and related APIs. The latest versions of wine are actually amazing. One of the issues I've often had was that wine included with most distros is an ancient version many many years old. This gives an impression of the state of the project that is not in line with current reality.

Current version of wine will actually run almost all of my non-game windows software including office which is awesome. I fully plan on ditching Windows for good once W7 is abandoned. Microsoft's behavior is simply unacceptable.

Re:WIll it support Java yet?

[Bert64]

If it's java, is it really windows software? It might run just fine with the linux version of java...

Several people have got the windows version of java running on wine, according to the wine site the installer doesnt work but java itself does so you can take an already installed version, copy it across and run it.

Re:WIll it support Java yet?

[someoneOtherThanMe]

Can't install Java? I can do that just fine (wine-1.9.11 (Staging), which came with my version of Ubuntu).