Wine has been updated to version 1.7.33 and the developers have made a number of important changes and improvements, although the new update doesn't seem to be as big as the previous ones.

Wine has a very precise use: to run applications developed for the Windows platform in a Linux environment. As you can expect, this is not exactly an easy task and a lot of work goes into this project. The best thing about it is that you don't need to have a Windows license and it's not illegal to use Wine this way.

More and more developers are making their applications compatible with the Linux platform and Wine is slowly becoming a little less relevant, but the situation is not exactly dire.

It will take a few years for Wine to become useless, but even then the Linux support won't run apps retroactively and people will still need it to run older software. As you can easily see from the changelog, many of the apps and games that are made to run with Wine are actually quite old.

Wine looks like it’s approaching a stable release

It's been quite a while since the latest stable version. All the latest updates were made only for the development branch. In fact, the previous stable release, 1.6.2, arrived on January 10, so it's been almost an year. The changelog for today's iteration is pretty short and we can only hope that we're finally going to get some news about the other branch.

"Different software programs are designed for different operating systems, and most won't work on systems that they weren't designed for. Windows programs, for example, won't run in Linux because they contain instructions that the system can't understand until they're translated by the Windows environment. Linux programs, likewise, won't run under the Windows operating system because Windows is unable to interpret all of their instructions," reads the official website.

The list of supported games and apps for this version is rather short: Starcraft II: Installer, YouSendIt, PPTV, OriginPro 8, Visual C++ 2010 Express, Patrol Falcon, Ableton Live 9.1, Gears of War, ArdourXchange, Age of Wushu, Winhttprequest, Valgrind, Path of Exile, Sketchup 2015, Puritan Hard Drive (PHD), Propellerhead Reason 8, and K-Lite installer.

Also, the developers also implemented copy and paste commands in MSHTML, much better support for DirectWrite, improved window focus in Direct3D windows, and numerous API dlls.

How to install the latest version of Wine in Ubuntu

Users can get Wine 1.7.33 from the source code, but Ubuntu users can install it from a PPA. Just enter these commands in a terminal (with root access):