Wine 7.0's Many Features From Better Theming To Improved HiDPI To New Joystick Driver

We are closing in on the release of Wine 7.0 as the annual stable feature release for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications under Linux, macOS, BSDs, and other platforms. Here is a recap of the many changes being introduced since last year's Wine 6.0 milestone.

Wine 7.0 has been seeing weekly release candidates and is expected for its formal release this month. In fact, it could be as soon as next week going off the project's usual RC rhythm. In any case as a reminder to all of the changes introduced over the past year with the bi-weekly Wine 6.x development releases, here is a look back at what's new to Wine 7.0 stable:

- Converting many Wine components to Portable Executable (PE) format such as libraries for WineGStreamer, DNSAPI, Secur32, WPCAP, WinePulse, WinSock, IPHLPAPI, Shell32, WineBus, IPHlpApi, NsiProxy, WineDbg, MSXml, XAudio, DInput, mount manager, CoreAudio, and more.

- Theming support for all of Wine's built-in programs. Wine also added built-in "blue" and "classic blue" themes. Also on the theming front is now proper scrollbar theming support as well as better HiDPI theming.

- Improved HiDPI support for Wine's built-in apps.

- An initial HID-based joystick back-end was introduced and matured this past year to the point of being enabled by default.

- Wine updated its OpenCL support to OpenCL 1.2 compatibility.

- Support for VKD3D 1.2 as part of Wine's Direct3D 12 over Vulkan effort.

- Support for Rosetta's memory layout used on the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 Macs. These Wine changes are needed for this Apple x86 to AArch64 translator to avoid Rosetta's memory regions and other differences.

- Plug and play driver support improvements.

- The bundled Mono engine was updated against Mono 6.x releases this past year and then ultimately over to Mono 7.0.

- Support for loading libraries from architecture-specific sub-directories. Wine's build system has also been updated around the arch-specific directories support.

- Started work on supporting MSDASQL as the Microsoft OLE DB provider for Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers. MSDASQL allows for accessing / connecting to the many different DBMS data sources out there that offer ODBC drivers from Oracle to Microsoft Access and more.

- All remaining C run-time (CRT) math functions were imported from the Musl libc C library.

- Implementing more 32-bit to 64-bit thunks and other WoW64 work.

- Unicode 14 support.

- Various WinRT improvements.

- Hundreds of bug fixes.

Granted, most Linux/open-source enthusiasts likely stick to the bi-weekly Wine development releases or downstreams like Proton (Steam Play) or Wine-Staging, but for those users and distributions relying on stable Wine series these are some of the major highlights.

Look for Wine 7.0 to be released soon.