Wine is an open source compatibility layer that allows you to run some Windows software on Linux or Mac computers. This week version 2.0 was released and, among other things, it brings support for running Office 2013 on Linux and 64-bit support for macOS.

If those improvements sound familiar, that’s because they showed up in CrossOver 16 late last year.

CrossOver is a commercial application from a company called CodeWeavers, which is closely related to the open source Wine project. CodeWeavers is a corporate sponsor of Wine, and much of the work done on CrossOver eventually makes its way to Wine… which means we could see support for using Wine to run Windows apps on some Android /Chrome OS devices in the future.

Other changes include improved text and font features, better clipboard support, the ability to use some uncommon display resolutions including 640 x 400 and 1280 x 960, and better support for high-DPI displays.

Wine 2.0 comes almost a decade after the release of version 1.0, but as Google taught us long ago, version numbers can be arbitrary… and in this case, the developers of Wine note that they’ve just moved to a new annual release schedule, which means that some features which were under development weren’t finished up in time for this release.

So we can look forward to an Android graphics driver, Direct3D command stream, and other improvements in the future.

via Softpedia

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