14 DAY TRIAL // Today, December 19, 2015, the team of developers behind the Wine project, an open source software that lets Linux users run games and apps built for the Microsoft Windows operating system, were extremely proud to announce the final and stable release, as well as the immediate availability for download of Wine 1.8.
Wine 1.8 comes after one and a half years in the making, during which the Wine team released over 50 milestones under the 1.7 development branch, as well as four RC (Release Candidate) builds. It was one of the greatest efforts in the history of open source software and includes over 13,000 changes.
"The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.8 is now available. This release represents 17 months of development effort and around 13,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the implementation of DirectWrite and Direct2D, and the new Pulse Audio driver," reads today's announcement.
What's new in Wine 1.8
Wine 1.8 is a major milestone in the history of the project, bringing a huge number of improvements across all of its components, as well as support for a broad range of Windows applications and games. The software is now available for download for all major GNU/Linux operating systems (see the download link at the end of the article).
Prominent features of Wine 1.8 include DirectWrite implementation for better text and font, Direct2D support, Direct3D 11 support, DirectDraw improvements, PulseAudio driver implementation for better audio and video, support for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, Mac OS X support, as well as user interface improvements.
Furthermore, the X11 implementation received X drag & drop protocol support, the Gecko engine has been upgraded to Firefox 40, there are numerous networking improvements, along with various OLE and COM enhancements, and printing just got a lot better. Download Wine 1.8 right now from Softpedia.