Wine 10.0 Official Release Scheduled for Mid-January 2025: A Major Leap in Cross-Platform Compatibility

Wine, the renowned open-source project, is committed to enabling Unix-like systems to run Windows applications. This project has gained widespread usage, notably in Valve's Steam Deck, where Wine serves as the foundation for the Proton compatibility layer, facilitating the play of Windows games.

According to the project's lead developer, Alexandre Julliard, Wine is set to unveil its significant version update, Wine 10.0, in mid-January 2025.

The development team plans to release Wine 10.0 RC1 on December 6, marking the beginning of an annual code freeze. This period will primarily focus on bug fixes rather than introducing new features.

From the code freeze until the official launch of Wine 10.0 in mid-January 2025, efforts will pivot towards enhancing features and functionalities for the subsequent Wine 10.x releases, signaling a return to active development of new capabilities.

Key enhancements in Wine 10.0 include, but are not limited to:

• Enhanced support for Unicode emojis and strings.
• Improved compatibility with Wayland.
• Significant optimizations in DirectPlay support.
• A new media backend utilizing the FFmpeg project.
• Optimized support for the Arm64 architecture.
• Preliminary implementation of driver store support.
• Expanded support for ODBC Windows drivers.
• Enhanced process privilege elevation.
• Improved Dvorak keyboard detection, and more.

Given Valve's use of Wine to develop the Proton compatibility layer, the release of Wine 10.0 is expected to prompt Valve to quickly introduce a new version of Proton based on Wine 10.0. This update aims to improve the experience of playing Windows games on the Steam Deck.