Wine 9.0 with experimental Wayland driver and new WoW64 mode is out

Wine 9.0 is out. The non-emulator for Linux features more than 7,000 changes from the major release a year ago. One of the biggest changes is an experimental driver for display server Wayland and WoW64 support.

Wine 9.0 is the biggest new release since Wine 8.0, which came out a year ago. The makers write in the release notes that the tool contains more than 7000 small changes. Notably, Wine 9 includes an experimental Wayland driver. This is not enabled by default, but can be enabled via the registry. The developers say they are continuing to work on the display server, but the driver already supports window management, more than one monitor and DPI scaling, and has support for Vulkan. The addition in Wine is a new step in the increasing adoption of Wayland, a display driver that is supported in more and more distros and could eventually replace drivers such as Xorg.

Also new in Wine 9.0 is the improved WoW64 mode. That mode was added for the first time in Wine 8.0. That made it possible to run 32bit applications without the need for 32bit libraries. However, the old mode had the limitation that those apps always ran in a 32bit Unix load. The makers have now added a new mode that makes it possible to install 32bit applications on a full 64bit operating system. According to the makers, this is not yet a standard, but users can enable it manually. That should work for most applications, but the developers warn that there are also limitations to the experimental feature.

Other notable improvements within Wine 9.0 include better support for Direct3D, including more efficient power usage and better Vulkan driver support. Wine 9.0 is a stable release.