Wine (acronym for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”) is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on various POSIX-compliant operating systems such as Linux, macOS, and BSD. Wine does not imitate the internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, but translates Windows API calls into dynamic POSIX calls, which saves memory usage for performance and other behaviors, allowing you to cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop.

The beginning of each year is when Wine releases a major version update, and Wine 8.0 is now officially released as scheduled. After a year of biweekly development releases for Wine 7.x, Wine 8.0 incorporates all the changes made over the past year. While these changes can be found in biweekly builds over the past year, the highlights of Wine 8.0’s updates over Wine 7.0 include:

• Finished converting all Wine modules to PE format.This is important for copy protection, 32-bit app support on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers, running X86 apps on Arm, etc.
• Work continues on WoW64 to eventually allow 32-bit Windows applications to work without 32-bit Unix libraries, but this work is still in progress and the Windows-like WoW64 mode is still experimental
• Added “light” graphics theme to default configuration
• Print Processor architecture has been implemented
• Ongoing improvements around Direct2D and Direct3D functionality, including performance optimizations
• The VKD3D shader library has implemented a new HLSL compiler and disassembler
• Gamepad hot-swap support has been greatly improved
• Better support for steering wheel peripheral detection, force feedback, and other input functions
• Improvements to font handling
• Update Mono engine to Mono 7.4
• All built-in apps use Common Controls v6 by default for HiDPI rendering and theming
• Updates to various build infrastructure and development tools
• Updates to many bundled libraries in Wine
• OpenAL32.dll wrapper library removed

Users can download and learn more about the details of the Wine 8.0 release via WineHQ.org.