Wine 9.0-rc1 Released With Upgraded VKD3D, Wine Wayland Improvements

The release process has begun for releasing Wine 9.0 as stable early next year.

Wine 9.0-rc1 was released today to wrap up the Wine 8.xx bi-weekly development releases of the year. Now the code freeze begins and the focus is on landing bug fixes for the next month or two until Wine 9.0 stable is ready to be christened in January~February.

Squeezing into Wine 9.0-rc1 before the code freeze was more Wine Wayland improvements. Vulkan on Wine Wayland is now usable and there is initial mouselook and relative motion support along with keyboard layouts support.

Wine 9.0-rc1 also pulls in the VKD3D 1.10 release for providing the latest Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan API implementation. Linux gamers though are best off using Valve's downstream, VKD3D-Proton.

Wine 9.0-rc1 additionally adds support for DH encryption keys in conjunction with recent GNuTLS versions. Plus there are 42 known bug fixes in Wine 9.0-rc1 fixing different Windows games and applications.

Downloads and more details on Wine 9.0-rc1 can be found via WineHQ.org.