Wine 4.0 is preparing to make a lot of improvements to Windows applications on Linux.

Wine (acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatible layer that can run Windows applications on a variety of POSIX-compliant operating systems such as Linux, macOS, BSD, etc. Instead of imitating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or simulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into dynamic POSIX calls, eliminating the memory footprint of performance and other behaviors, allowing you to cleanly aggregate Windows applications to your desktop.

Alexandre Julliard, founder and lead developer of Wine, has developed a release plan around the upcoming stable version of Wine 4.0 to provide a year of improvements to running Windows games / applications on Linux,BSD and macOS.

Although the Wine open source project took 15 years to reach the 1.0 milestone, Wine is now maintaining the status of an annual major release update, and will release Wine 4.0 at the beginning of the new year, which will be a stable version.

Alexandre Julliard plans to start freezing Wine 4.0 code on December 7, and there will be weekly release candidates for Wine 4.0 after the code freeze begins. If all goes well and like previous annual versions of Wine, Wine 4.0.0 should be released in January.

This year, Wine has achieved good results in terms of stability with the support of Vulkan, including improvements to running games under Wine, FreeType sub-pixel font rendering, Wine Direct3D default to OpenGL kernel context, better shell autocompletion, improved support for HiDPI, default support for Direct3D CSMT, etc., as well as a large number of application / game-specific fixes.

All in all, Wine 4.0 should be a very good release, especially for gamers.