Wine 11.16 is now available as the latest development release of the popular compatibility layer for running Windows applications and games on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
One notable addition in this release is hardware video decoding through VA-API, allowing Wine applications to use GPU-accelerated video decoding on supported Linux systems. This should reduce CPU usage and improve playback efficiency for Windows applications that rely on supported video decoding paths.
The bundled Wine Mono engine has been updated to version 11.3. More importantly, this release introduces ARM64 support to Wine Mono, improving Wine’s capabilities on ARM-based systems when running Windows applications that depend on Microsoft’s .NET Framework APIs.
Wine 11.16 also brings improvements to exception handling on ARM64EC, Microsoft’s ABI designed to allow ARM64 and emulated x64 code to coexist within the same Windows process.
Beyond these headline changes, the release includes 35 bug fixes covering a broad range of Windows software and games.
Among them is a fix for an issue preventing Steam from launching and a regression that caused the WineWayland driver to stop working in Wine 11.15. Wine developers also addressed an incorrect cursor in Star Citizen’s inventory and terminal menus, crashes affecting some x86 WPF applications, and vertically offset mouse hit testing in WebView2 applications running under X11.
Other fixes target Acrobat Reader DC locking up when opening a PDF directly through Wine, SteelSeries GG 110.0 crashing during startup, Total Commander TLS 1.2 FTPS connections, and Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars installer crashes.
The long-standing Adobe Creative Cloud installer crash inside Wine’s MSXML3 implementation is also listed among the resolved issues, as is an installation freeze affecting Silhouette Studio.
Additional fixes cover several older Windows applications and games, including Stratego, Backpacker, Ignition, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, Just Grandma and Me, Klik and Play, and Pettersson und Findus.
For more details, visit the announcement. Wine 11.16’s source code can be downloaded from GitLab’s project page. The binary packages for supported Linux distributions are expected to become available through WineHQ’s respective package repositories.
