So Wine 1.6 got finalized about 10 days ago, and I curious as to it and the general state of wine usage around here at the moment. I realize that's a pretty broad question, but it's a broad curiosity. I wouldn't mind even tossing a little Linux/mac native discussion in along with it.

Well, you'd see big changes if you'd be jumping from version 1.4.1 to 1.6. People using vanilla wine probably got all the goodies as they were trickled into the 1.5.x dev versions so for them it's not that big of a jump.

PlayOnLinux/Mac users also might not notice a big jump, because they are able to download various builds of wine as they are made available.

Crossover users will be jumping from wine version 1.5.15(ish) to 1.6 in the upcoming 12.5 release.

I've noticed these improvements (jumping from wine 1.5.15 to 1.6):

- the original Witcher game would not run reliably and now it does. What was wrong with it? There's a laundry list on winehq
- wine had issues with torchlight II, aside from issues with shadows in some of the acts, where I had to use a mod that drastically reduced the number of particle effects. Not needed anymore.
- DragonAge Ultimate Edition (origins + awakening + all DLCs) required some special registry settings, now it does not but. Still crashes at random times, especially when there seems to be a lot going on the screen. Good place to make this crash happen more often is in the Circle Tower main quest, while in the fade. Trying to morph through the various forms will trigger a crash eventually.
- Radio Sure now works for me. Installs, runs, plays internet radio streams just fine. There are a few cosmetic issues with title display on those streams that support this feature. You will notice some weird chars in the titles

May be some more, but the above are just off the top of my head.

As always, with wine it's always about one specific application that might or might not work.

I like both red and white! Oh, wait.....wrong wine.

I don't like red or white! And anyway wine sucks. Or should I call it win€.

Oh wait... wrong whine.

I'm on Debian, but haven't used Wine for awhile since there are plenty of games available natively these days. Will check it out once 1.6 enters the repo though (it's only got 1.6 rc 5 at the moment). I looked into compiling it from source, but it seems that on 64-bit system it's more trouble than it's worth.

I'm going to probably retry the witcher then. I tried to get it to work around 4 months ago maybe, and it just had too many graphical glitches going on. Seemed close to working, but just not there.

^^ What he said.

The biggest development for Mac users was a display driver that natively uses Mac OS X's display layer for rendering graphics, instead of the XWindows-based system that was carried over from Linux. That was introduced in about the later 1.5.2x series. That alone led to huge advances in compatibility, in addition to clearing up the endemic screen corruption issues encountered with Mac OS X 10.7.x. All in all, I've been really amazed by how far things have advanced from the later 1.5.2x and 1.5.3x builds all the way up the 1.6rc builds (especially 1.6rc4), with regards to compatibility and stability.

Dark Reign and Outcast - two games which have been perennial thorns in my side with regards to compatibility - work flawlessly now out of the box (especially Outcast, when played with the community hi-res patch). Serious Sam 1 and 2 both were apparently thought impossible since they suffered from some massive graphical rendering errors apparently stemming from bugs in their game engine - now, these games too work perfectly out of the box for me in 1.6rc4. Icewind Dale II suffered from its notorious flashing cursor/sluggish performance issue in earlier 1.5.x and 1.4.x builds...in 1.6rc4 the game works perfectly.

The only wrinkle I've found is that enabling the native Mac driver leads to a performance hit, which I can usually resolve by setting UseGLSL=disable in the registry. Also, I think there's something wrong with doh123's packaged build of WINE 1.6 final in the Wineskin Winery repository; in my testing, I've found the same earlier screen corruption problems I encountered with pre-Mac driver WINE builds in 10.7, something I haven't seen in 1.6rc4 and below.

For me, WINE 1.4 was what opened the floodgates for game compatibility, and from WINE 1.5 on up to 1.6, it's just gotten better and better.