Wine 8.1 Released - Now Exposed As "Windows 10" For New Prefixes

Following the release of Wine 8.0 stable from a week and a half ago, Wine 8.1 is out today as the first bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms. These Wine 8.x development snapshots will then culminate with the release of Wine 9.0 next year.

With the Wine code-base having been frozen since early December when preparing the Wine 8.0 release candidates, Wine 8.1 has let in many code clean-ups and other changes that were deferred during the 8.0 code freeze. There is also various bug fixes in v8.1 -- more than two dozen affecting Anno 1800, Dungeons & Dragons Online, GOG Galaxy, various Blizzard games, and other software. Those fixes in time will be back-ported to the stable Wine 8.0.x point releases.

Also notable is Wine 8.1 adding the VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support for that Vulkan API extension for high dynamic range (HDR) metadata handling as part of Valve's work on supporting HDR-enabled Windows games with Steam Play (Proton).

The most significant change though with Wine 8.1 is now setting "Windows 10" as the Windows version when creating new Wine prefixes. Previously Wine defaulted to advertising itself as "Windows 7" while now with Wine 8.1+ it's defaulting to using Windows 10 ("Windows 10 Pro" to be exact).

The full list of changes encompassing Wine 8.1 can be found via the release announcement on WineHQ.org.