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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/wine-10-0-released-adding-linux-compatibility-for-arm-windows-apps/ [arstechnica.com]

The open source Wine project—sometimes stylized WINE, for Wine Is Not an Emulator—has become an important tool for companies and individuals who want to make Windows apps and games run on operating systems like Linux or even macOS.
[...]
Yesterday, the Wine project announced the stable release of version 10.0 [winehq.org], the next major version of the compatibility layer that is not an emulator. The headliner for this release is support for ARM64EC [microsoft.com], the application binary interface (ABI) used for Arm apps in Windows 11, but the release notes say that the release contains "over 6,000 individual changes" produced over "a year of development effort."
[...]
Wine's ARM64EC support does have one limitation that will keep it from working on some prominent Arm Linux distributions, at least by default: the release notes say it "requires the system page size to be 4K
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Asahi Linux, the Fedora-based distribution that's working to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, uses 16K pages because that's all Apple's processors support. Some versions of the Raspberry Pi OS also default to a 16K page size, though it's possible to switch to 4K for compatibility's sake [pimylifeup.com]. Given that the Raspberry Pi and Asahi Linux are two of the biggest Linux-on-Arm projects going right now, that does at least somewhat limit the appeal of ARM64EC support in Wine. But as we've seen with Proton and other successful Wine-based compatibility layers, laying the groundwork now can deliver big benefits down the road.

Other new additions to Wine 10.0 include improved support for high-DPI displays, which should be better at automatically scaling app windows that aren't DPI-aware.
[...]
Though various version of Windows have been running on Arm processors for over a decade now, last year was when the project became a credible mainstream computing platform.
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Microsoft also released the Windows 11 24H2 update, which looks like another routine yearly update on the surface but included large under-the-hood overhauls [arstechnica.com] of Windows' compiler, kernel, and scheduler that improved performance for Arm chips as well as some x86 chips [arstechnica.com]. Microsoft also updated and branded its x86-to-Arm code translation feature, now called "Prism [arstechnica.com]."
[...]
Finally—and most relevantly, for people using Wine—the company convinced a critical mass of major app developers to release versions of their apps that ran natively on the Arm versions of Windows. That included major browsers like Google Chrome [arstechnica.com], creative apps like Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo, and productivity apps like Dropbox [dropbox.com] and Google Drive [theverge.com].

Related stories on SolyentNews: winehq search [soylentnews.org]

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