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The guys at WineHQ have been serving up a lot of new ‘varietals’ of their application in recent months, particularly after receiving sponsorship from Google. With an average of 2 or 3 new upgraded versions per month, the developers released Wine 0.9.57 and 0.9.58 last month, and just yesterday they brought us Wine 0.9.59.

For those of you still wondering what the Wine application is, let me explain. Wine is an open source project that takes the Windows API and transposes it onto Mac and Unix based systems (OSX, OpenGL, etc). You can use it to run most current Windows programs, although there is still a fair number that don’t work at all. This is partly what the Wine team is trying to address with their frequent updates. Take a look at the OSLiving Archive entry on Wine for more details.

So, what’s new in this latest version? Let’s take a quick look. The WineHQ offical website states that the .NET framework has been given some ’support love’, meaning that Windows apps running on Wine should generally work much better. A separate services.exe process will handle the services more efficient and in case you had some problems with http proxies, you’ll be glad to know that these issues seem to have been fixed (services.exe, or Services Control Manager is responsible for the system services, running/stopping and interacting with them).

In addition to this, the management of application windows has improved and Wine now also supports the ATI fragment shader. A fragment shader, commonly referred to as ‘pixel shader’, is a set of instructions for rendering effects or to calculate the color of an object. Last but not least, in this latest release, you also get a ‘bonus’ with the inclusion of some pre-compiled fonts in the source tree leaving you with a full bodied, ever mature application.

Whilst I have nothing against using Wine - I’ve used it off and on to run certain Windows applications when they were lacking on Linux - but I really would like to urge developers to concentrate their efforts on creating applications that run natively on Linux, rather using applications like Wine as a Windows proxy. No offence to the noble efforts of the Wine crew, but the more applications that are designed specifically for Linux based systems, the more Open Source software will become ubiquitous.

In case you want to find out more about Wine, you can check the official site and the changelog for the 0.9.59 release.