Finally not having to enable 32bit support just for Steam won’t be necessary anymore. Now distros might actually be able to drop 32 bit packages, without anyone caring.

The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 9.0 is now available.

This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed below. The main highlights are the new WoW64 architecture and the experimental Wayland driver.

The source is available at https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/9.0/wine-9.0.tar.xz

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from https://www.winehq.org/download

You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS for the complete list.

What’s new in Wine 9.0

WoW64

• All transitions from Windows to Unix code go through the NT syscall interface. This is a major milestone that marks the completion of the multi-year re-architecturing work to convert modules to PE format and introduce a proper boundary between the Windows and Unix worlds.
• All modules that call a Unix library contain WoW64 thunks to enable calling the 64-bit Unix library from 32-bit PE code. This means that it is possible to run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation. This is called the new WoW64 mode, as opposed to the old WoW64 mode where 32-bit applications run inside a 32-bit Unix process.
• The new WoW64 mode is not yet enabled by default. It can be enabled by passing the --enable-archs=i386,x86_64 option to configure. This is expected to work for most applications, but there are still some limitations, in particular:
  • Lack of support for 16-bit code.
  • Reduced OpenGL performance and lack of ARB_buffer_storage extension support.
• The new WoW64 mode finally allows 32-bit applications to run on recent macOS versions that removed support for 32-bit Unix processes.

Wayland driver

• There is an experimental Wayland graphics driver. It’s still a work in progress, but already implements many features, such as basic window management, multiple monitors, high-DPI scaling, relative motion events, and Vulkan support.

• The Wayland driver is not yet enabled by default. It can be enabled through the HKCU\Software\Wine\Drivers registry key by running:

  wine reg.exe add HKCU\\Software\\Wine\\Drivers /v Graphics /d x11,wayland
  

  and then making sure that the DISPLAY environment variable is unset.

ARM64

• The completion of the PE/Unix separation means that it’s possible to run existing Windows binaries on ARM64.
• The loader supports loading ARM64X and ARM64EC modules.
• The 32-bit x86 emulation interface is implemented. No emulation library is provided with Wine at this point, but an external library that exports the interface can be used, by specifying its name in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Wow64\x86 registry key. The FEX emulator implements this interface when built as PE.
• There is initial support for building Wine for the ARM64EC architecture, using an experimental LLVM toolchain. Once the toolchain is ready, this will be used to do a proper ARM64X build and enable 64-bit x86 emulation.

Graphics

• The PostScript driver is reimplemented to work from Windows-format spool files and avoid any direct calls from the Unix side.
• WinRT theming supports a dark theme option, with a corresponding toggle in WineCfg.
• The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.3.272 of the Vulkan spec.
• A number of GdiPlus functions are optimized for better graphics performance.

Direct3D

• The multi-threaded command stream sleeps instead of spinning when not processing rendering commands. This lowers power consumption in programs which do not occupy the command stream’s entire available bandwidth. Power consumption should be comparable to when the multi-threaded command stream is disabled.
• Direct3D 10 effects support many more instructions.
• Various optimizations have been made to core WineD3D and the Vulkan backend.
• The Vulkan renderer properly validates that required features are supported by the underlying device, and reports the corresponding Direct3D feature level to the application.
• D3DXFillTextureTX and D3DXFillCubeTextureTX are implemented.
• The legacy OpenGL ARB shader backend supports shadow sampling via ARB_fragment_program_shadow.
• The HLSL compiler supports matrix majority compilation flags.
• D3DXLoadMeshHierarchyFromX and related functions support user data loading via ID3DXLoadUserData.

Audio / Video

• The foundation of several of the DirectMusic modules is implemented. Many tests are added to validate the behavior of the dmime sequencer and the dmsynth MIDI synthesizer.
• DLS1 and DLS2 sound font loading is implemented, as well as SF2 format for compatibility with Linux standard MIDI sound fonts.
• MIDI playback is implemented in dmsynth, with the integration of the software synthesizer from the FluidSynth library, and using DirectSound for audio output.
• Doppler shift is supported in DirectSound.
• The Indeo IV50 Video for Windows decoder is implemented.

DirectShow

• The Windows Media Video (WMV) decoder DirectX Media Object (DMO) is implemented.
• The DirectShow Audio Capture filter is implemented.
• The DirectShow MPEG‑1 Stream Splitter filter supports video and system streams as well as audio streams.
• The DirectShow MPEG‑1 Video Decoder filter is implemented.

Input devices

• DirectInput action maps are implemented, improving compatibility with many old games that use this to map controller inputs to in-game actions.

Desktop integration

• URL/URI protocol associations are exported as URL handlers to the Linux desktop.
• Monitor information like name and model id are retrieved from the physical monitor’s Extended Display Identification Data (EDID).
• In full-screen desktop mode, the desktop window can be closed through the “Exit desktop” entry in the Start menu.

Internationalization

• IME implementation is improved, with better support for native Windows IME implementations. Many tests are added to validate the expected behavior of these custom IMEs.
• Linux IME integration is improved, using over-the-spot or on-the-spot input styles whenever possible, and more accurate IME message sequences.
• Locale data is generated from the Unicode CLDR database version 44. The following additional locales are supported: bew-ID, blo-BJ, csw-CA, ie-EE, mic-CA, prg-PL, skr-PK, tyv-RU, vmw-MZ, xnr-IN, and za-CN.
• The user interface is translated to Georgian, bringing the total of full translations to 16 languages, with partial translations to another 31 languages.
• Unicode character tables are based on version 15.1.0 of the Unicode Standard.
• The timezone data is generated from the IANA timezone database version 2023c.
• Locales using a script name, like zh-Hans, are also supported on macOS.

Kernel

• The default Windows version for new prefixes is set to Windows 10.
• Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is supported for modern PE binaries, to avoid issues with address space conflicts. Note that the selected load addresses are not yet properly randomized.
• The Low Fragmentation Heap (LFH) is implemented for better memory allocation performance.
• The virtual memory allocator supports memory placeholders, to allow applications to reserve virtual space.
• The 64-bit loader and preloader are built as position-independent executables (PIE), to free up some of the 32-bit address space.
• Stack unwinding works correctly across NT syscalls and user callbacks.

Internet and networking

• All builtin MSHTML objects are proper Gecko cycle collector participants.
• Synchronous XMLHttpRequest mode is supported in MSHTML.
• WeakMap object is implemented in JScript.
• The Gecko engine is updated to version 2.47.4.
• Network interface change notifications are implemented.

Cryptography and security

• Smart cards are supported in the Winscard dll, using the Unix PCSClite library.
• Diffie-Hellman keys are supported in BCrypt.
• The Negotiate security package is implemented.

Mono / .NET

• The Mono engine is updated to version 8.1.0.

Builtin applications

• The Wine Debugger (winedbg) uses the Zydis library for more accurate x86 disassembly.
• WineCfg supports selecting old (pre-XP) Windows versions also in 64-bit prefixes, to enable using ancient applications with the new WoW64 mode.
• All graphical builtin applications report errors with a message box instead of printing messages on the console.
• The systeminfo application prints various data from the Windows Management Instrumentation database.
• The klist application lists Kerberos tickets.
• The taskkill application supports terminating child processes.
• The start application supports a /machine option to select the architecture to use when running hybrid x86/ARM executables.
• Most of the functionality of the tasklist application is implemented.
• The findstr application provides basic functionality.

[…continued in a reply, due to Lemmy’s character limit…]