As expected, the launch of Wine 4.0 (No not the one you drink) , a new major version of this popular software with which to run Windows applications on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, has been announced.

The project, which turned 25 years old last July, has not stopped its activity since it began. While it took version 1.0 15 years to appear, the following have gone much faster. As of the launch of Wine 2.0 in January 2017, the annual release schedule that is currently maintained is established and after Wine 3.0 arrives, how could it be otherwise, Wine 4.0 is here!

What’s new with Wine 4.0 you must be asking? The brief official announcement speaks of more than 6,000 changes compared to the previous version, highlighting advances such as Vulkan support , Direct3D 12, game controllers and exclusively for Android, HiDPI support. Between one and another major version, yes, users can jump to the developing branch to try all the news, before they reach the stable version.

Remember that Wine is not an emulator , but a free reimplementation of the Windows APIs developed by reverse engineering, so the work to introduce such important changes is hard. On Windows they are based and with Wine they collaborate from derivative commercial products such as CrossOver , operating systems such as ReactOS or more recent initiatives such as Steam Play .

Delving a little deeper into the release notes of Wine 4.0 details what the aforementioned novelties and many more consist of: full support for Vulkan (only for X11) and initial for Direct3D 12, although the latter is linked to the previous one, since only It is available for graphics cards compatible with Vulkan; to the full support of Direct3D 10 and 11 for Intel and AMD graphics cards (at least, matching the level of features supported in the new version, which are many).

Among those more than 6,000 changes Wine 4.0 brings hundreds of very specific improvements that include graphics, audio, kernel, user interfaces, integration with the desktop, input devices, networks, security, translations, development tools … Impossible to collect everything. It is best to review the release notes linked above.

Wine is available in the repositories of the main Linux distributions, but to upgrade to the new version, go to the official download page , where instructions are given.