Finally the WINE (recursive acronym for Wine Is Not Emulator) developers has announced availability of Wine 2.0 stable release. This release includes numerous changes on underlying components and comes with better application support.

Wine is basically a compatibly layer for running windows binary executables on different POSIX compliant platforms like GNU/Linux, BSD and macOS. WINE is not a mere emulator, instead it maps windows system calls into native system calls on real time and hence provide better performance than an emulator.

Main highlight of WINE 2.0 is support for MS Office 2013, new office suite published by Microsoft Corporation and 64 bit application support in macOS operating system. It took almost one complete year to finish development of WINE 2.0 and it includes around 6,600 individual revisions after previous release. These revisoins provides support for a lot of new games and applications.

WINE 2.0 is first stable release in revised annual release plan for the project. When a release is published strict annual basis, there can be space for some incomplete changes and WINE 2.0 is not and exception.

This release represents over a year of development effort and around 6,600 individual changes. The main highlights are the support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the 64-bit support on macOS.

It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as support for many new applications and games. See the release notes below for a summary of the major changes.

This is the first release made on the new time-based, annual release schedule. This implies that some features that are being worked on but couldn't be finished in time have been deferred to the next development cycle. This includes in particular the Direct3D command stream, the full HID support, the Android graphics driver, and message-mode pipes.

For a complete list of changes, see release announcement in WINE project website.