Wine 10.0, the latest Windows compatibility layer for Linux, has a stable release.
Bundles over 6000 changes into one stable release, including ARM64EC support.
Yesterday morning, WineHQ released an overview of Wine 10.0, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux upon which several projects have been derived, including Valve’s Proton, which has massively expanded Windows game compatibility on Linux over time. Wine, stylized “WINE,” most literally means “Wine Is Not an Emulator,” since its purpose is to do real-time compatibility work only as needed rather than wholly emulate a fixed software (Windows) or hardware environment.
Wine’s release highlights include major updates for nearly every component of Linux, but one of the most highlighted changes is the addition of support for Arm64EC. Arm64EC, or “Arm64 Emulation Compatible,” is an application binary interface for Windows 11 on Arm. This means those applications should now work better on Linux—and, according to WineHQ, take “advantage of the ARM64EC support to run all of the Wine code as native, with only the application’s x86-64 code requiring emulation.”
Various bug fixes and driver updates have been applied to the graphics front, and support for high-DPI (dots per inch, in this context, resolution) displays have improved. Most prominently, it includes auto-scaling functionality for application windows that otherwise don’t support it. Additionally, Direct3D helper libraries have also seen several improvements to DirectX 9 support for several older applications.
