Just announced the launch of the new version of Wine Launcher 1.4.46, and in this new version come several very important changes for the application and that is that of all those mentioned in the announcement, We can highlight the support for PipeWire, the installation of VKD3D, a debugging mode, performance improvements for Nvidia and table graphics, among other things.
For those unaware of Wine Launcher, You should know that this is a project that, as its name implies, is a Wine launcher that is geared towards video games. Wine Launcher is a project that if you have tried PlayOnLinux, Lutris and / or Crossover you will immediately have the feeling that you are with an application that takes something from each one.
This project It is characterized by being developed as a container for Windows games based on Wine.
Among the features the project highlights the modern style of the initiator, the isolation and independence of the system, in addition to provide each game with Wine and Prefix separately, which ensures that the game does not crash when updating Wine on the system and will always work.
Main news of Wine Launcher 1.4.46
In this new version of Wine Launcher 1.4.46, a lot of important changes are highlighted and of the most prominent are for example the PipeWire media server support for handling audio and video and hardware, as well as allowing handles multimedia routing and pipeline processing.
Another change that stands out is that sand added VKD3D Proton installation (a fork of VKD3D, which aims to implement the full Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan).
In addition, we can also find that the installation of Media Foundation, as well as the eAutomatic xtraction of an icon from an exe file.
As for the improvements, it is mentioned that Squashfs compression algorithm was improved, with which the reading speed increased by approximately 35% and the design of the application was also slightly updated.
It is also mentioned that various performance optimizations have been made that were added for NVIDIA and Mesa video controllers.
Last but not least, it is also worth mentioning that the debug mode “env debug = 1 ./start” was added in this new version.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Completion of the implemented Winetricks command
- MangoHud has been updated to version 0.6.1.
- Added verification of compatibility of Wine loaded with current OS.
- Wine now shows the minimum required version of Glibc.
- Fixed support for the default prefix in Proton.
- Fixed release on Debian 10.
- Added database of game settings.
- Added “My Patches” section, intended for exchanging pre-made patches between different Wine Launcher assemblies.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it About this new version of Wine Launcher 1.4.46, you can check the details in the following link.
How to install Wine Launcher on Ubuntu and derivatives?
This application does not have compiled packages for each distribution, but a single package is generally distributed to which We must give it execution permissions to be able to launch it, with which basically in almost any Linux distribution the package is functional.
The only dependency it requires is to have Wine installed. In order to obtain the package, just go to its repository and look for the most recent package (we can obtain this from the following link).
Or for those who prefer to save this, they can do it directly from the terminal by typing:
wget https://github.com/hitman249/wine-launcher/releases/download/v1.4.46/start
We give permissions and execute with:
chmod +x ./start && ./start
To add a game, just click on “add new game” and the following window will open where we will place information about the game:
- Name
- Version
- description (optional)
- Game path
- launcher name
- arguments to the launcher (optional)
- Add an icon (size)
- And some additional options
