Wine 6.0 Officially Released with Vulkan Backend for WineD3D, This Is What’s New

Wine 6.0

The Wine development team released today the final Wine 6.0 series of the open-source compatibility layer for running Windows apps on GNU/Linux distributions and other UNIX systems.

A year in the making, Wine 6.0 is here to provide GNU/Linux users with much-improved support for running Windows applications and gams on their beloved distributions. Major changes including support for core modules in the PE format, Vulkan backend for WineD3D, DirectShow and Media Foundation support, as well as revamped text console.

“This release is dedicated to the memory of Ken Thomases, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 51. Ken was an incredibly brilliant developer, and the mastermind behind the macOS support in Wine. We all miss his skills, his patience, and his dark sense of humor,” reads the announcement.

Highlights of Wine 6.0 include new Direct3D 11 features like per render-target blend states, dual-source blending, and multi-sample anti-aliasing sample masks, support for Direct3D 9 alpha-to-coverage multi-sampling, support for more graphics cards and newer graphics drivers, as well as support for Vulkan driver 1.2.162.

The libUSB library is now being used to implement the USB driver and the VkD3D-Shader library for translating Direct3D shaders to SPIR-V shaders for the WineD3D Vulkan renderer. The Mono engine was updated as well in this release to version 5.1.1 to better support .NET applications.

It also supports a new LLVM-MinGW compiler for PE cross-compilation, implements a new /v option to allow WineCfg to query and modify the configured Windows version via the command-line, adds support for searching multiple files via a new FIND tool, and support for displaying the current username via a new WHOAMI tool.

Security-wise, Wine 6.0 implements and enables by default the DSSENH (Digital Signatures) Cryptographic Provider and adds support for additional algorithms in the BCrypt library, including the 3DES cipher and DSA keys.

Networking support has been improved as well in this major release thanks to the implementation of the WebSocket API and the NDIS network driver, the bump of the Gecko engine to version 2.47.2, and better LDAP and Active Directory Service support.

Other noteworthy features include Plug & Play device notifications, XRandR 1.4 support for retrieving display settings, Unicode 13.0 support, Windows version compatibility mode for reporting new Windows versions to apps, and much more that can be studied in the full changelog.

Wine 6.0 is available for download right now from the official website for Linux OS vendors who want to integrate it on their GNU/Linux distributions, as well as anyone else who fancy compiling their own software. Everyone else should keep an eye on the stable repos of their favorite distros for the Wine 6.0 packages in the coming days.

Last updated 3 years ago

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