The latest development version of Wine 8.21 has been released .
Wine (an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer that can run Windows applications on a variety of POSIX-compliant operating systems (such as Linux, macOS, and BSD) . It does not imitate the internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, but translates Windows API calls into dynamic POSIX calls, eliminating the memory usage of performance and other behaviors, and can cleanly integrate Windows applications into the desktop.
Wine 8.21 is the latest bi-weekly development release and the last before the feature freeze. The update highlight of this version is the continued improvement of the Wine Wayland driver. Wine's native Wayland support now includes initial HiDPI scaling support and initial Vulkan support. Although Vulkan support is not yet fully available, efforts are underway to integrate all components, and more features will be added to the Wine Wayland driver before the code freeze for Wine 9.0.
HiDPI is important for modern monitors, and Vulkan support is important for modern Windows games expected to use Wine on Wayland.
In addition, Wine 8.21 also begins to support the ARM64EC target. ARM64EC is a new ABI for Windows 11 applications on ARM to help build new native applications or gradually migrate from x64 applications to native ARM64.
Wine 8.21 also updates the locale database and fixes approximately 29 known bugs. These bug fixes range from Wayland driver fixes to fixes for Direct3D 10 issues, as well as a variety of fixes for games and applications.