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The Wine 5.2 development release is here with another set of bug fixes towards the next major release of the open-source compatibility layer for running Windows apps on Linux and UNIX systems.
The bi-weekly development cycle continues after Wine 5.1, and Wine 5.2 fixes more crashes and other issues that may block users from using certain Windows apps and games on their GNU/Linux distributions. However, you should keep in mind that this is an unstable release that may not work as expected.
Highlights of this release include the ability to use the null display driver as a real driver, improved support for UTF-8 character encodings in the Resource and Message Compilers, implementation of more compatible codepage mapping tables, and better support for using ucrtbase as C runtime.
While these changes may not interest all users, you should know that Wine 5.2 adds better support for several Windows games too, including ARMA: Armed Assault, Lineage 2, The Sims 2 Demo, Spintires: MudRunner, as well as Star Wars: Rebellion v1.01 Patch. These games should now work better and no longer crash.
Also improved is support for multiple Steam games that failed to install the DirectX runtime prerequisite, which resulted in an install loop on startup. Wine 5.2 also implements GPU information for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB graphics card.
Furthermore, Wine 5.2 improves support for several Windows apps, including Affinity Photo 1.7.2 (Trial), Arturia MIDI Control Center, Cadence Allegro Professional 16.6, Free PDF to Word Doc Converter, Lotus Approach, Mozilla Firefox 72.0.*, OllyDbg 2.x, PDF-XChange Viewer 2.5.213, SumatraPDF 3.1.2, and Verbum 8.
A total of 22 bugs were addressed in this new Wine development release, and you can check out the full changelog in the release announcement page. Meanwhile, if you want to give this version a try, download the Wine 5.2 source tarball here or the binaries for various GNU/Linux distributions here.
Last updated 4 years ago
