Wine 6.0 Release Preparations Begin In Two Weeks

With Wine on an annual stable release cadence for shipping new stable feature releases generally at the beginning of each calendar year after a year's worth of bi-weekly development snapshots, Wine 6.0 is due for release around January.

Following Friday's Wine 5.22 release, Wine project founder and leader Alexandre Julliard sent out word this morning that the processes will soon begin rolling for that Wine 6.0 release.

Two weeks from now for the next development release will also mark the start of the code freeze for Wine 6.0. Following that, the Wine 6.0 release candidates will continue until the official Wine 6.0.0 release is ready to ship.

That official Wine 6.0 release is expected sometime in January, depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out. Julliard is hoping that given the COVID-19 pandemic and many people planning to remain home during the Christmas holiday season, hopefully more progress than usual will be made during the ending weeks of the year.

Among the many changes that have built up in this year's Wine 5.xx development releases include a lot of continuing Vulkan improvements, Unicode 13 support, a lot of PE conversion work, better GDB proxy support for debugging, the Direct3D Vulkan back-end still forming as an alternative to the Direct3D to OpenGL path, better WebSocket API support, an initial version of the Webdings font, support for AVX registers, sRGB color profile support, and many other enhancements. There have also been many low-level additions and fixes for helping 2020 Windows game releases and software like the new Microsoft Flight Simulator. It will be interesting to see what more lands over the next roughly two weeks to squeeze into the Wine 6.0 release.