Wine HQ announced the release of Wine 3.0 today. The new version of Wine comes with support for Direct3D 10 and 11, improved DirectWrite and Direct2D support, and more features.

Wine enables users on Linux, Mac OS X and other non-Windows systems to run Windows programs without requiring a copy of Microsoft Windows.

It is, for instance, useful to get Windows software to run on Linux machines that would not be available otherwise. Think of computer games, Adobe Photoshop or other programs that are not available for Linux.

The Wine community maintains a database of the compatibility of games and programs. You can check out the database here to find out if a program or game that you want to run is compatible.

The Wine 3.0 source code is already available. Binary releases are built right now and will be published once that is done.

Wine 3.0

The developers note that Wine 3.0 features over 6000 changes over the previous release. Open the release notes for a list of important changes that went into the new release.

Here is a short list of important changes:

• Default Windows version set to Windows 7.
• Support for a signficant number of Direct3D 10 and 11 features including compute shaders, stream output, structured buffers and more.
• Improved support for OpenGL core contexts in Direct3D.
• Support for more Direct3D graphics cards.
• OpenGL extension list updated to OpenGL 4.6.
• Wine can be built as an APK package and behaves like an Android app.
• Full graphic and audio driver for Android.
• Async I/O performance improvements.
• Mouse cursors redesigned and support high DPI screens.
• Shell Explorer, common dialogs and RichEdit control scale properly on high DPI screens.
• Higher display resolution support in desktop mode.
• AES encryption supported.

You can run wine --version to find out which version of Wine is installed on the system. Installation and upgrade instructions are provided on the official website.