A brand new stable release of Wine, the open-source software that lets you run Windows apps on Linux, is now available to download.

Wine 2.0 — yes, 2.0 — follows more than a year of development effort and marks the start of a new timed-based release cadence.

That means you can expect newer versions of Wine, with less fermenting.

Various miscellaneous changes make up Wine 2.0, ranging from support for Unicode 9.0; better HiDPI scaling; improved clipboard behaviour; an updated Gecko engine; and adjustments to joystick button mapping and force feedback effects.

For gamers Wine 2.0 implements, fixes and polishes a slew of Direct3D 10/11 features, including more shader instructions, sRGB read/write support, array textures and so on, plus there are tweaks to DirectX support.

On the audio side there’s GStreamer 1.0 support, DirectSound down-mixing to stereo.

Other highlights include support for Microsoft Office 2013, and the ability to run 64-bit applications on something called macOS, say the team in their announcement.

Install Wine 2.0 on Ubuntu

Wine 2.0 is available to download from WineHQ right now — but you’ll need to compile it by hand.

Chances are you (like me) are too lazy to do that. Instead, to install Wine 2.0 on Ubuntu you can make use of the official Wine builds PPA.

First run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wine/wine-builds

Once added to your software sources you can can upgrade or install the latest stable release using:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install winehq-devel