Wine 8.5 Released With VKD3D 1.7 Included, WinRT App Dark Theme

Wine 8.5 is out to end out the month as the newest bi-weekly development release for enjoying the ability to run Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Last week saw the release of VKD3D 1.7 for that Direct3D 12 implementation atop the industry-standard Vulkan API. VKD3D 1.7 added additional HLSL features, numerous intrinsic functions now wired up, the ability to call user-defined functions, and a range of other improvements for improving the Direct3D 12 support within Wine. The Wine 8.5 release has pulled in the new VKD3D 1.7 codebase into its tree.

Wine 8.5 also adds a new option to Winecfg to set an option for having a WinRT app dark theme, better error reporting within the IDL compiler, support for shared WoW64 classes registry key, clean-ups within the IME support, and various bug fixes.

There are 21 known bug fixes in Wine 8.5 affecting software like Notepad++, reg.exe, Chocolatey OpenSSH, and Chromium to games like Deus Ex: Invisible War, Fair Strike, and others.

Downloads and more details on the Wine 8.5 release via WineHQ.org.

Wine and downstreams like CrossOver Office have continued to improve a lot over time for increasing the viability of Windows games/apps on Linux... For some Friday fun, a look back at CrossOver in 2005.