Two weeks after announcing the availability of the Wine 2.1 development release, the Wine team published today the second development version after the popular open-source application hit the major 2.0 milestone in January.
Prominent features of the Wine 2.2 development release include support for setting the default Window version for all newly created Wine prefixes to Windows 7, more work for the upcoming Direct3D command stream, the implementation of additional Shader Model 5 instructions, as well as initial support for double-buffered theme painting.
A total of 35 issues reported by users since Wine 2.1 or previous releases of the application have been addressed in Wine 2.2, and, according to the changelog (also attached at the end of the article for your reading pleasure), the Artemis 2.4.0, VHD Attach 3.90, 3DMark2001 SE, and iMesh 10 Windows apps should work much better.
Moreover, the Samsung TV SDK 3.5.2 Emulator, PDF XChange Editor, AmiBroker 6.00, and Winamp applications also received some attention in Wine 2.2, along with the Marvel Heroes 2015 Launcher and various KiriKiri Z based games. A few memory leaks and other nasty issues have been patched too.
Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Hitman: Absolution received improvements
On the other hand, Wine 2.2 adds various improvements to the Black & White, Venom Codename: Outbreak, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Enemy Front, Urban Assault, Civilization II, Steep, Zafehouse Demo, Hitman: Absolution, and Grand Theft Auto IV Windows games if you want to run them on your GNU/Linux distribution.
The Wine 2.2 development release is now available for download from our website, as a tarball that contains the sources, which need to be compiled on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution if you want to take this snapshot for a test drive. However, we recommend staying on the stable branch for now, which is Wine 2.0.
