Wine 11 Delivers Stable WoW64 for 16-bit Applications

Summary Wine 11 is now available - WoW64 mode is stable with feature parity to the old experimental mode. New WoW64 supports 16-bit applications; WINEARCH=wow64 forces the new mode; pure 32-bit prefixes are deprecated. Single wine loader replaces wine64, auto-selects 64-bit by default; launch 32-bit via explicit SysWOW64 path. Wine has come a long way since I last used it. The last time I gave it a try, it was around 2010, when I was trying out Ubuntu. I couldn't imagine leaving my Windows apps behind, so I just fed everything into Wine and hoped for the best. As you might imagine, things really didn't pan out, and I didn't touch Linux again until mid-2025, where I became a proper convert. These days, my daily driver apps from Windows also work on Linux, so I haven't needed to grab Wine again. However, there are still some cases where people put it to good use, like the recent breakthrough of installing Photoshop with it. Now, Wine 11 has hit the general release branch, and it includes a feature that's been cooking since 2024. Wine 11 brings WoW64 mode out of experimental mode Plus, a ton of other additions You can check out all the juicy details covering the new release over on the Wine 11 patch notes page. The list goes on for quite a while, but the star of the show is the introduction of WoW64 mode as a stable feature with "feature parity with the old WoW64 mode." We first saw the feature release in Wine 9 back in 2024 as an experiment, and now it's ready for everyone to use. Here's all the extra stuff that's coming with WoW64 mode in Wine 11: 16-bit applications are supported in the new WoW64 mode. It is possible to force an old WoW64 installation to run in new WoW64 mode by setting the variable WINEARCH=wow64. This requires the prefix to have been created as 64-bit (the default). Pure 32-bit prefixes created with WINEARCH=win32 are deprecated, and are not supported in new WoW64 mode. The wine64 loader binary is removed, in favor of a single wine loader that selects the correct mode based on the binary being executed. For binaries that have both 32-bit and 64-bit versions installed, it defaults to 64-bit. The 32-bit version can then be launched with an explicit path, e.g. wine c:\\windows\\syswow64\\notepad.exe.