Wine 11.0 Release Candidate 4 released
The Wine team has released the fourth release candidate for Wine 11.0, representing another step forward towards the upcoming final version of Wine 11. This is primarily a bug fix release.
There haven't been any new features or significant enhancements this time around; instead, work has focused on stability ahead of the final launch by implementing a code freeze to prevent regressions. If you're interested in the development process, you can find the source for this particular milestone here. You can also grab the latest binary builds for your distribution from their usual places soon.
For those wanting to dive deeper without compiling, the documentation lives on GitLab and if you're interested in seeing who's pulling the strings under the hood, check out the CONTRIBUTORS file.
This release specifically tackles bugs reported by users, with 22 fixes included this go-round. Notable among these are improvements for slow parallel port access (which can drag down some old hardware), resolved crashes in applications like Bitwarden and classic games such as Wing Commander Secret Ops/Prophecy, and a fix addressing performance dips when running benchmarks on Nvidia GPUs.
Here's what else changed since the last RC release:
- Akihiro Sagawa worked on getting ready for the final drop: polishing up the Japanese translation.
- Alexandre Julliard contributed four updates. His changes include better support for ATL thunk emulation and some tweaks to wow64 mode operation.
- André Zwing handled an issue related to ARM64EC targets by disabling compiler exceptions before Clang 21.
- Bernhard Kölbl fixed a duplicated hresult problem found in the windows.media.speech/tests area.
Other contributors chipped in too:
- Bernhard Übelacker addressed potential crashes in GnuTLS logging related to unloaded libraries.
- Elizabeth Figura made eight additions and adjustments to wined3d, including implementing missing states and refining vertex declaration handling along with viewport settings.
- Esme Povirk updated Wine Mono to version 10.4.1.
Further refinements came from:
- Matteo Bruni, who improved UBOs in the graphics code parts of wined3d/gl, splitting them into separate chunks for better management.
- Rémi Bernon made changes to how windows are activated, tracked, and presented, and he also worked on adjusting opacity and how input shapes are handled using a dummy parent element.
And community members like Sven Baars ran tests related to comctl32 version 6, setting default values for up-down controls and fixing the UDM_GETACCEL return value issue.
These individual contributions really show how Wine comes together as a stable platform. The team's focus on getting things right this release cycle keeps it heading towards that final goal of providing a reliable way to run Windows apps on Linux.
