Available now for testing on all GNU/Linux operating systems

Feb 24, 2016 00:55 GMT  ·  By

It looks like, after the release of the 1.9.3 milestone two weeks ago, the Wine Staging team is back at work pushing new versions of the open-source software based on the latest upstream Wine development builds.

Wine Staging 1.9.4 was announced on February 23, 2016, and according to the release notes, it is based on the recently released Wine 1.9.4 milestone, which introduced support for more formats in Direct3D 11, support for font fallbacks and color glyphs in DirectWrite, as well as WebServices reader improvements.

Besides all of those goodies, the new Wine Staging release improves the handling of windows when the winex11 driver is used, fixes numerous bugs reported by users since the previous snapshot, and adds better support for various Windows applications and games, most of which have been noted in the Wine 1.9.4 announcement.

"One of the main goals of Wine is to integrate Windows applications as seamlessly as possible into the host system. This release improves the integration when using the X11 backend and an application tries to bring a specific window to the foreground," the developer explains.

GOG Galaxy client should work much better now

Among other interesting things that have been fixed in the Wine Staging 1.9.4 release, we can mention improvements to the Wines d3dx9_36 implementation and better support for the GOG Galaxy client, which should now have much shorter startup times and a working auto-updater tool.

Applications like Adobe After Effects 4 and Evoland should also function a lot better now, so if you want to help the Wine Staging team with the development of their software that lets you run Windows apps and games on your Linux box, go ahead and download the Wine Staging 1.9.4 release right now via Softpedia.

Wine Staging 1.9.4 Changelog