Windows Application compatibility layer Wine 8.1 release: the "Windows 10" prefix is enabled by default

CTOnews.com February 3, the Wine development team released the Wine 8.0 stable update a week and a half ago, and today it launched the Wine 8.1 update again. Using Wine applications, users can run Windows applications and games on Linux, macOS and other systems.

CTOnews.com learned that Wine 8.1 is the first version of snapshot with a two-week development cycle, mainly fixing "era 1800" (Anno 1800), "Dungeons & Dragons Online" (Dungeons & Dragons Online), "Galactic Adventures" (GOG Galaxy), a number of Blizzard games, and some software problems. These content fixes will be migrated to the maintenance version update of Wine 8.x.

It is worth noting that Wine 8.1 added support for VK_EXT_hdr_metadata to extend Vulkan API. The VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension is used to process high dynamic range (HDR) metadata for primary colors, white dots, and luminance ranges that are part of the Vulkan exchange chain.

This Wine patch is required to handle HDR for native Vulkan games (such as Doom Eternal) and Direct3D games with HDR support that leverages DXVK or VKD3D-Proton.

The most significant change in Wine 8.1 is to set "Windows 10" to the Windows version when creating a new Wine prefix. Wine used to advertise itself as "Windows 7" by default, but now it uses Wine 8.1 +, which defaults to Windows 10 ("Windows 10 Pro" to be exact).