The Wine Project, a compatibility layer that enables Linux and macOS users to run Windows applications, has officially released version 11.0. The headline change is the completion of the new WoW64 architecture, which is now fully supported and considered feature-complete.

First introduced experimentally in Wine 9.0, the new WoW64 mode now supports 16-bit Windows applications, removes the separate wine64 loader in favor of a single unified loader, and deprecates pure 32-bit prefixes created with WINEARCH=win32. Existing 64-bit prefixes can be forced into the new mode by setting WINEARCH=wow64.

Another major improvement is NTSync support, which allows Wine to use the Linux kernel’s NTSync module when available. Starting with Linux kernel 6.14, this significantly improves the performance of Windows synchronization primitives, reducing overhead in multi-threaded applications and games. Wine 11.0 also adds thread priority handling on Linux and macOS, along with new synchronization barriers in NTDLL.