Wine 5.0 Code Freeze To Begin Next Week

As expected by Wine's annual release cadence, next week Wine 5.0 will enter its code freeze followed by release candidates until this next stable Wine release is ready to ship around early 2020.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard shared that following next week's development release will mark the expected code freeze season for Wine 5.0. Wine 4.22 will be out one week from today and the last point by which Wine developers can land any features they want to see in this annual stable release. Following that will be weekly Wine 5.0 release candidates until the 5.0.0 release is ready to ship, likely in January or February.

Wine 5.0 is bringing a number of Vulkan improvements (including Vulkan 1.1 support) although the Direct3D 12 / VKD3D support isn't yet feature complete, better LLVM MinGW support, DXTn compressed textures support, various debugging improvements, an HTTP Service implementation, more Plug-and-Play driver support, joystick improvements, Unicode updates, FAudio support for its XAudio2 implementation, and fixes/improvements for playing both older and new Windows games.

Stay tuned for more details on Wine 5.0 as its release approaches, meanwhile it will be interesting to see what more lands over the course of the next week.