After five release candidate stages, a year of development effort, and “over 7,000 individual changes,” Wine 9.0 is now released as stable. Some new features with this release:

  • WoW64 support
  • experimental Wayland support – basic window management, multiple monitors, high-DPI scaling, relative motion events, and Vulkan support
  • Windows binaries can now be run on ARM64!
  • dark theme support via WinRT theming
  • support up to Vulkan 1.3.272
  • “better graphics performance” via GdiPlus function optimizations
  • lower power consumption “in programs which do not occupy the command stream’s entire available bandwidth”
  • D3D10 effects “support many more instructions”
  • better compatibility with older games that use DirectInput action maps
  • “better memory allocation performance” via Low Fragmentation Heap (LFH)
  • updates to bundled libraries, including VKD3D (1.10) and Faudio (23.12)
  • among many, many other improvements

Keep in mind in regards to Wayland, it isn’t enabled by default. Users will have to run the following:

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

Then make sure the DISPLAY environment variable is unset.

It will probably take a few months before Valve re-bases Proton on this new release, but no doubt it will be an update to look forward to!

See the full patch notes on WineHQ.