This release has been a year in the making, with a new stable Wine release done once a year with many development releases in between bringing over 7,000 individual changes. There's some truly big stuff in this release too and some of the highlights include:
- An experimental Wayland graphics driver, not enabled by default yet.
- Lots of WoW64 work including the completion of converting modules to PE format to "introduce a proper boundary between the Windows and Unix worlds". They say it's now possible to run 32-bit Windows applications on a purely 64-bit Unix installation but this new WoW64 mode is not yet enabled by default.
- The completion of the PE/Unix separation means that it's possible to run existing Windows binaries on ARM64.
- The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.3.272 of the Vulkan spec.
- Various optimizations have been made to core WineD3D and the Vulkan backend.
- A number of GdiPlus functions are optimized for better graphics performance.
- The Windows Media Video (WMV) decoder DirectX Media Object (DMO) is implemented.
- DirectInput action maps are implemented, improving compatibility with many old games that use this to map controller inputs to in-game actions.
- URL/URI protocol associations are exported as URL handlers to the Linux desktop.
- Lots of Internationalization improvements including updates for Unicode and better support for native Windows IME implementations.
The list goes on for a while, that's just some cherry-picked big additions.
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