Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Transparently runs 16, 32, and 64-bit Windows apps, but still doesn't use the Microsoft store.

The latest version of the Wine Windows app runner arrives a year after version 10. Given its annual release cycle, its magic is starting to seem almost boring and routine, but it's far from it.

The Wine project delivered Wine 11.0 Tuesday, very slightly less than one year after we covered the release of Wine 10.

Wine lets you run 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit Windows x86 binaries on modern Unix and Unix-like OSes. This release eliminates the separation between 32-bit and 64-bit commands: it handles running 32-bit Windows binaries on 64-bit OSes internally.

On Linux, this version supports the kernel's NT synchronization primitive, or ntsync for short. This was introduced in kernel 6.14 in March 2025, and it adds Windows-NT-compatible synchronization primitives to the Linux kernel, in addition to its native futex() system call.

Linux's own methods work perfectly fine for native apps, but the Windows NT kernel has three different types of sync calls. Emulating those in userspace software is perfectly possible, but it's not very fast, so the new /dev/ntsync device offers fast, in-kernel NT-compatible calls, as Linux Weekly News explained in detail in February 2024. It will still run on older kernels, just a little more slowly.

NTSync represents a fairly unusual sort of addition to the Linux kernel, as it brings no benefit to native Linux programs – it just improves the performance of Windows binaries running via Wine. As we described back in 2023, Valve's SteamOS is noticeably driving both the performance and compatibility of Windows programs on Linux in recent years. (Valve released SteamOS 3.7.19 last week, and new SteamOS hardware is coming "in early 2026".)

Natively, Wine is an x86 program itself, but it can run on non-x86 processors too. On Arm64 Linux, it can use FEX-Emu for x86-to-Arm translation. A separate project called Hangover combines Wine and FEX-Emu into one to let you install and run x86 Windows programs on Arm64 Linux. (It can also run Windows Arm64 binaries on x86-64 Linux, if you should want that for some strange reason.)

As we mentioned when RHEL 9.2 came out, on Arm64 systems, changing the memory management page size is a compile-time option for the Linux kernel: you can't alter it on the fly. On Arm64, Wine 11 can work around this by simulating different page sizes.

On Macs, Wine 11 is an x86-64 program, but it runs on Apple Silicon Macs using Rosetta 2, meaning that it takes advantage of Apple's own highly-optimized x86-64 to Arm64 translation.

As of Wine 11, there are no longer separate wine32 and wine64 commands: there's just one wine command, and it works out what's needed for itself. Wine 11 no longer uses 32-bit support libraries. That means that on OSes which still offer 32-bit libraries, like most mainstream Linuxes (including Fedora, at least for now) Wine 11 is smaller than before – but it also means that it works on OSes that have removed 32-bit library support. This is nothing new for macOS, but it's helpful for distros such as openSUSE Leap 16 which have dropped the old binary format.

As in the previous version, Wine 11 will output natively over Wayland if it's available, but now it can handle the clipboard on Wayland, too. It still works with X11, though, and now natively handles things like switching into full-screen mode. Direct3D support has been improved, and Wine 11 can use native Vulkan video decoding of H.264 video. There's improved handling of SCSI, scanning, joysticks and gamepads, including force-feedback, plus lots more less-apparent changes.

Wine 11 downloads are available for Linux and Apple macOS now, and although the FreeBSD port is still on version 10 for the time being, the new version should make its way there too.

We tried the official version 11.0 wine-stable packages on the latest Ubuntu 25.10 under GNOME using Wayland. It worked fine, and we were able to install and run the 32-bit Microsoft Word Viewer and Microsoft Excel viewer from the Legacy Update download center. We also grabbed the latest 64-bit version of our favorite image viewer IrfanView, and it installed and ran first time.

We did notice that the WineHQ packages installed into /opt/wine-stable and didn't add symlinks to /usr/bin or insert itself into the shell's path. We had to do that by hand, then apps launched seamlessly.

If this sounds like too much tech-nerdery, that is perfectly fine. As The Register has done repeatedly since at least 2002, we recommend Codeweavers' excellent Crossover tool as an easier and more compatible alternative. We can't really talk about the gaming experience, but we'd suggest starting by installing Steam.

Wine makes this significant tech wizardry seem quite routine and easy these days. It's not perfect – for instance, we don't yet know of a way to install apps from the Microsoft Store – but it's very impressive. Although it took 15 years to get to version 1.0, the project now releases new major versions annually and the focus is moving from basic compatibility to integration and performance. It's real, it's ready, it works, and it's free – and of course, you don't need a Windows license. ®