Wine 2.0 Ready: Office 2013, Photoshop CS 2017 and a number of new games will Run on Linux

It took almost a year with dozens of beta releases and numerous editions, but Wine 2.0 has finally been launched.

With significant feature improvements and enhanced support for Microsoft Windows programs, Wine 2.0 is ready for Linux users. Wine, which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator, directly calls Windows API in a Linux environment without virtually creating a Windows environment. This approach makes memory and space constraints nearly invisible.

The final version of Wine 2.0 in its stable release is now available. Wine is a valuable application for users looking to break free from the Windows environment while still taking advantage of Windows-specific software. Wine 2.0 comes with almost 6600 changes related to texture, 2D and 3D graphics, user interface, and audio network. Wine 2.0 enables users to run Linux and MAC OS and even allows for running Microsoft Office 2013, as well as many games using Microsoft DirectX 11.

In the realm of 2D graphics, there have been significant improvements. These include accelerated drawing window rendering for bitmaps and interface elements via a DIB optimization engine that uses Direct 2D. Wine 2.0 offers support for high-resolution HiDPI with proper scaling of interface elements for non-standard screen resolutions. As for text and fonts, it is equipped with additional DirectWrite support, allowing for font embedding in PDF files and generating glyphs for bitmap fonts.

Regarding sound performance, Wine 2.0 includes GStreamer 1.0 and supports audio mixing for 5.1 and 4.1 channels, which can be down-mixed to stereo using DirectSound. The user interface of Wine 2.0 provides users with new clipboard-handling options, enhancing copy-and-paste capabilities and drag-and-drop functionality. The desktop taskbar has been added, displaying running applications and allowing users to switch between applications. Wine 2.0 has also improved JavaScript performance and features Gecko engine integration in Firefox 47. Additionally, it is equipped with Microsoft Web Services API support for SOAP calls.

You can find the full change log on the project website. If you want to install Wine 2.0 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or its derivatives, you can use the official PPA repository. To do this, you need to add the repository to your Linux system using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine-staging

A list of software with Windows compatibility that can now operate with Wine 2.0 is available on the WineHQ database. You will find popular items such as DOOM 3: BFG Edition, Final Fantasy XI Online, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (all with Platinum support), as well as DOOM (2016), Star Wars: The Old Republic, SolidWorks, or Adobe Photoshop CC 2017.