Features For The Upcoming Wine 1.6 Release

Tagged on Friday was the first Wine 1.6 release candidate. For those curious about what will be found in this major release of Wine, in this article is a feature overview of Wine 1.6.

Back in February I wrote about Wine 1.6 coming this year with many new features and now it looks like it will be here this summer. The features mentioned back then were:

- Client-side rendering.
- Support for layered windows.
- A Mac graphics driver rather than having to rely on X11.
- The Wine-Mono package.
- Raw input support.

In going through the Wine 1.5 point releases, other committed features include:

- Use of built-in JavaScript support over using the Gecko engine.
- OpenGL support in the DIB engine.
- Early work on its own Direct3D shader compiler.
- Dynamic device support via UDisks2.
- RandR 1.2/1.3 support.
- Direct3D off-screen rendering by default.
- Multi-channel ALSA support.
- Full support for layered windows.
- Performance improvements.
- Initial 64-bit ARM support.
- Wine finally has its own Wingdings font.

Look for the Wine 1.6 release later this summer, for those not using the bi-weekly development releases to run your favorite Microsoft Windows applications on Linux and OS X.