The development team behind the Wine compatibility layer for Linux has announced the full release of Wine version 11.0, bringing several performance improvements with it.
One of the most notable changes coming with Wine 11 is the addition of support for utilizing the NTSYNC module in the Linux kernel. I wrote about this driver when it first appeared in kernel 6.14 almost a year ago. Now, Wine will be able to take advantage of it to drive better performance for Windows applications.
Wine 11 also notably brings better support for running under the Wayland windowing system. The clipboard is now supported, and input methods are here too, letting you enter characters not present on your keyboard. These upgrades are important, as more and more Linux distributions are moving or planning to move to Wayland-only environments.
Still, X11 isn’t being ignored with this release. The X11 window manager got better integration in Wine with Wine 11.
Speaking of graphics, the Vulkan API has been bumped to version 1.4.335. OpenGL saw several improvements and fixes too. Hardware-based decoding of the H.264 video compression standard via Direct3D 11 over Vulkan Video. The developers added about this:
Note that the Vulkan renderer must be used. As in previous Wine versions, the Vulkan renderer can be used by setting renderer to vulkan using the Direct3D registry key or WINE_D3D_CONFIG environment variable.
Several connectivity improvements are happening too. A lot of work is being done to better support gaming controllers, including the addition of force feedback support in both joysticks and driving wheels. Wine’s Bluetooth driver can also now scan for devices and, on Linux devices running BlueZ, can be paired via both the API and a wizard.
If you’re running music-making software under Wine, you can look forward to improved MIDI support and reduced latency in the synthesizer. The SoundFont file format saw further development in Wine 11 too, now allowing layering and instrument normalization.
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There are several more updates in Wine 11.0 you can read about in the release notes, including minor improvements for ARM64 devices, changes to the Direct3D helper libraries, and tweaks to networking and locale management.
If you want to get Wine 11, you can head to the Wine 11.0 source downloads folder to download the source code. If you don’t want to build it yourself, then on a rolling release Linux distribution, you can expect to see an update to the Wine package soon. At the time of writing, though, I’m seeing Wine still at version 10.20 in CachyOS and Arch Extra repositories.
The next name to watch is Proton. The Proton compatibility layer, developed by Valve, is based on Wine. A new Wine release means we can anticipate a major Proton update, which in turn means better support for Linux gaming on Steam and other platforms that take advantage of Valve’s open source development efforts.
Source: WineHQ
