Wine 1.8 is available in Wine Team PPA. Install it now!

How to install Wine 1.8 from Wine Team PPA on Ubuntu. Version 1.8 comes with many improvements including a Start Menu.

Wine 1.8 was released just a few days ago (on December 19th). This release comes with new features and improvements regarding font rendering, Direct2D and Direct3D graphics support, PulseAudio driver and OS reporting (it can report Windows version 8.1 and 10). It also features a Start Menu. See the full release notes on Wine website.

Wine 1.8 has been succesfully built and is now available from the Wine Team PPA (until today, it was only available in wine-builds PPA under a different package name: wine-devel).  To install it, all you have to do is add the PPA to your software sources and install wine1.8 package.

You can do this from Terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.8:i386

I prefer to install the 32 bits version because I don't need 64 bits Windows emulation. The above command will uninstall previously installed Wine versions.

We can see some changes in winecfg. You can select Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 versions now.

Wine configuration - Windows 10

Also, the Audio tab comes with speakers configuration options.

Wine 1.8 Audio settings

To enable the Start Menu, first enable virtual desktop emulation from winecfg (1), then launch regedit (2), go to HKCU\Software\Wine\Explorer\Desktops (3), make a new key named Default (4) and inside it add a DWORD key named EnableShell with value 1 (5).

Wine 1.8 Start Menu

It would have been nice if the bottom bar would act as a taskbar too (display opened windows).

This is a stable release and I had no issue with already installed apps from Wine 1.6 so far. It prompted me to install new versions of Gecko and Mono packages too. Will you update Wine to version 1.8?