Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
What's New:
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 3.0 is now available. This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below.
The main highlights are:
- Direct3D 10 and 11 support.
- The Direct3D command stream.
- The Android graphics driver.
- Improved DirectWrite and Direct2D support.
Once again, because of the annual release schedule, a number of features that are being worked on have been deferred to the next development cycle. This includes in particular Direct3D 12 and Vulkan support, as well as OpenGL ES support to enable Direct3D on Android.