Wine gets its first stable release
The first stable release of Wine has made an appearance, after 15 years of development and testing around the world.
Wine is described by its creators as an "open-source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix". It is, essentially, free software released under the GPL that lets Linux users install and run Windows applications. Its name was originally a recursive acronym of Wine Is Not an Emulator, although the project team now prefers people to think of it as "Wine is not just an emulator". The project started in 1993; the first beta version was released in October 2005; and Wine 1.0 was released on Tuesday.
Thousands of popular Windows applications have been tested on Linux installations using Wine, and have been found to "work very well", according to the Wine team. A list of tested applications is dominated by games — a longstanding weak spot for Linux — but others include Photoshop and 3DMark.