Wine 3.0 Released with Direct3D 11 support. Here’s how to install Wine on Ubuntu Linux Systems. This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements, such as Direct3D 10 and 11 support, Direct3D command stream, Android graphics driver and an improved DirectWrite and Direct2D support.
Wine (originally an acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”) is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly, eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.
Wine 3.0 Direct3D Changes
– A significant number of Direct3D 10 and 11 features are implemented in this release, including:
– Compute shaders.
– Hull and domain (tessellation) shaders.
– Stream output.
– Format capability queries.
– A large number of shader model 4 and 5 shader instructions.
– Shader model 4 and 5 interpolation modifiers.
– Shader model 4 and 5 clip and cull distances.
– Indirect draws and indirect compute dispatch.
– Structured buffers.
– Byte addressable buffers.
– Append and consume buffers.
– Unordered access view counters.
– Cube-map arrays.
– Layered rendering to 3-dimensional textures and texture arrays.
– Mip-map generation.
– Conservative depth output.
– Type-less (sub)resource copies.
– Depth bias.
– The multi-threaded command stream feature serializes Direct3D rendering commands from different threads into a single rendering thread. Its main purpose in this release is rendering correctness, but the feature also provides opportunities for future performance improvements. This feature is disabled by default.
– Support for OpenGL core contexts in Direct3D is improved, to the point that core contexts are used by default for Direct3D 10 and 11 applications on AMD and Intel graphics cards. As a result, users of those graphics cards in combination with Mesa OpenGL drivers should no longer need to set the “MaxVersionGL” registry key to enable Direct3D 10 and 11 support.
– The Direct3D graphics card database recognizes more graphics cards.
Wine 3.0 User Interface Changes
– The built-in mouse cursors are redesigned, and available in higher resolution for high DPI screens.
– The Shell Explorer, the common dialogs, and the RichEdit control properly scale on high DPI screens.
– The screen DPI value can be overridden by setting the “LogPixels” value under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.
– In desktop mode, higher display resolutions with various aspect ratios are supported.
– The Task Dialog common control is implemented.
– The Internal User Interface is supported in MSI.
– Double-buffered theme painting is implemented.
– The TWAIN library supports a user dialog for selecting the scanner source.
– Device-independent bitmaps and metafiles can be stored into the OLE Data Cache.
For a complete list of changes and fixes, visit https://www.winehq.org/announce/3.0
Download Wine 3.0
The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.
Install Wine
Run the following commands in Terminal to install Wine maintenance release 2.0.4 in Ubuntu Linux:
sudo apt-get update
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key
sudo apt-key add Release.key
sudo apt-add-repository https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine-staging winehq-staging winetricks
Once installed, you may have to install some additional Windows libraries and frameworks to run wine properly on Linux Ubuntu System. To do so, either run the command “winecfg” or “/opt/wine-devel/bin/winecfg” in Terminal and follow on-screen instructions.
If you wish to uninstall and remove Wine from Ubuntu System, run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge wine wine-*
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge
rm -rf ~/.wine/
rm -rf ~/.local/share/applications/wine*