It also implements indirect draws support in Direct 3D

Nov 11, 2017 12:48 GMT  ·  By

Wine, the open-source compatibility layer for running Windows apps and games on Linux-based and UNIX-like operating systems, has been updated today to version 2.21.

Wine 2.21 is a development release coming eleven days after the previous milestone, Wine 2.20, to add a bunch of enhancements, such as indirect draws support in Direct 3D, better serial port detection on GNU/Linux systems, as well as better DPI scaling in the Shell Explorer.

It also adds more metafile support in GdiPlus and attempts to fix WoW64 services and calling conventions for ARM hardware. As usual, there are several other bug fixes for various Windows apps and games, and, according to the internal changelog, Wine 2.21 addresses a total of 16 issues.

The Witcher 3 and Process Hacker 2.x improvements

Among the Windows games and apps that received improvements in the Wine 2.21 development release, we can mention The Witcher 3, Hydro Thunder from Midway Arcade Treasures 3, SPINTIRES, Winexy, Flame in the Flood, Medusa Demo, NieR: Automata, KeePass 2.x, and Process Hacker 2.x.

A few other under-the-hood fixes are present as well to improve the overall stability and reliability of Wine, and we recommend studying the full changelog attached at the end of the article if you're curious to know what exactly was changed in this new development release, which will be coming soon to your favorite OS.

As usual, you can download the Wine 2.21 source tarball right now from our website if you fancy compiling it on your GNU/Linux distribution. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a development snapshot that's not guaranteed to be bug-free, so it's better to use the stable build, Wine 2.0.3.

In the meantime, the Wine development team is working hard to bring us the next major stable release, Wine 3.0, which is expected to hit the streets by the end of the year with numerous new features like Android support, Direct3D 11 support, and Windows 7 as default Windows version for new Wine installations.

Wine 2.21 Changelog