Wine 9.0 Release Adds Experimental Wayland Driver

Wine is a popular open-source compatibility layer used to run Windows applications on Linux with ease; something that was a far cry a few years back.

Even Vaas would agree that Wine is a very neat piece of software that has taken Linux forward in a very meaningful way.

Last year, we took a look at the Wine 8.0 release that aimed to unify all the changes from the 7.x series of releases. But, it is now 2024, and we have yet another Wine release to take a look at.

Suggested Read 📖

🆕 Wine 9.0: What's New?

Debuting with this Wine release is an experimental Wayland graphics driver that brings about things like High-DPI scaling, support for multiple monitors, basic window management, and more.

However, this is not a complete implementation, and naturally is disabled by default. You can enable it by running the following command:

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

This comes as no surprise, as we have been seeing a steady growth in the adoption of Wayland, and Wine is just among the many to join the club. The coming years will be crucial for Wayland, and I hope it makes good on its promises.

On the graphics side of things, Wine now supports up to version 1.3.272 of the Vulkan spec and the PostScript driver was reimplemented to work using Windows-format spool files and to avoid any direct calls from Unix.

Building on the work done to convert modules into the PE format, now, on WoW64, all transitions from Windows to Unix code now go through the NT syscall interface.

There is also support for 32-bit applications on macOS thanks to the new WoW64 mode, which works by making calls to the 64-bit Unix library from the 32-bit PE code.

And finally, we have improvements to the input device support with Wine 9.0 that now implements DirectInput action maps to improve compatibility with many old games.

For details of the Wine 9.0 release, you may go through the changelog.

📥 Get Wine 9.0

The binary packages for Wine can be found on the official website, where you can find packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and macOS.

Wine 9.0

There are some other binary packages maintained by distros such as SUSE, Slackware and FreeBSD. If that doesn't interest you, then you could build from source by visiting its GitLab repo.

⚙️ Upgrade from Older Release

If you are running an older release of Wine, then follow these steps to get the latest release of Ubuntu, or systems equipped with Ubuntu-based derivatives.

Enable support for 32-bit architecture (if not enabled already) by running the following command:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Download the official Wine repo key and add it:

sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key

Then run one of the following commands to get the WineHQ sources file for your Ubuntu version:

sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/mantic/winehq-mantic.sources #Ubuntu 23.10

sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/lunar/winehq-lunar.sources #Ubuntu 23.04

sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/jammy/winehq-jammy.sources #Ubuntu 22.04

sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/focal/winehq-focal.sources #Ubuntu 20.04

And finally, to install Wine 9.0, run the following commands (separately):

sudo apt update

sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable

At the time of writing, the stable branch had the older Wine 8.x release for my system running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The development branch had the newer Wine 9.0 release, so I suggest you wait it out a bit before upgrading.

💬 What do you think about the Wine 9.0 release? Feel free to share your thoughts on it.