3.0

Good to know. Thanks for the info. I tend to wait a couple weeks before updating to see if there are any reported problems or instabilities - probably a holdover from my Windows days.

I believe the rc is the "in process" experimental branch. I've heard it can better help certain games, but unless you are one of those needing or wanting to experiment with those games I'd go with clarry's suggestion and stick with 3.0.

RC is, as Engerek01 found out, a release candidate. So an rc of 3.0 is some version that was considered for release as 3.0. A total of six release candidates were made for 3.0. The last one of them is basically identical to the final release.

For the experimental stuff, people tend to go for wine-staging. Or builds of the development branch.

Ah. Thank you for clearing that up. Either I was misinformed or more likely I misunderstood what was meant about the rc's being in-process try-outs for updating Wine releases. Is it true/accurate then that some rc's are used because they may work better for certain games over the official release? Or have I been misinformed on that? While starting to play (experiment) a bit more with Linux I am still a ways from wine-staging ... one of the reasons I greatly appreciate adamhm's wrappers!

Thanks to both of you

Well, you were quite close to the what, it was the why that was incorrect.

There are two types of releases: stable and unstable (in-development, still not finished, this can break stuff and was not tested very well).
The RC (Release Candidate) are of these type of releases. They mean "we think this is quite solid-looking, so try it out. If nobody finds fault with it, we will just rename it to the finished stable version".
Some times one or more bugs are found so a new RC is released, so the devs start numbering them.
3.0-rc1-6 is the first release candidate released.

What is the "-6"? Well, occasionally the devs or the packagers mess up in small ways and replace the release with an updated version that does not need a new version number. Those are minor fixes such as typos, changed some strings, forgot to update or to include some documentation, changed compilation flags, occidentally compiled it with debug symbols and so on. Bugs found on "-3" are relevant to all "-x" releases, the code is essentially the same; so if you are testing "3.0-rc1" you don't need to download "3.0-rc1-6".

Now, at some point "3.0" came out. Either the RC was a success or so few bugs were corrected that the devs were confident on their work. But until that day arrived, the RC were the most advanced and experimental releases that were available with features not available in any stable release. So you perception holds up, and is true just for that windows of time in which the RC were significant.

Thank you for the thorough clarification, Gede. I appreciate it. :)

I have a question about wine3.0 so I wanted to ask it here instead of creating an other topic.

I am using Linux Mint 18.3. I was using WINE 1.6.2 which is in Mint's own Software Manager. After this topic, I removed it and installed 3.0 from wine HQ. But I remember it warned me about some things not being installed by default, unlike mint's own wine version.

I have Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 installed on my Windows partition. Before that default WINE change on my Linux system, I was able to right click the exe file --> Open With --> Wine Windows Program Loader and I was able to play them normally. However, after the 3.0 change, I am not able to play NWN2 anymore. I can play NWN1 just fine, everything works as they should (even better than Windows I might add) But NWN2 does not run giving those 2 consecutive error messages. I have a feeling this has got something to do with those components that I have not installed.

Tnx.

NOTE: It is not urgent since I do not play these games. I only open them when I am answering a question in the forum. It is nice experimenting with wine since I feel like I'll be using it a lot in the future.

EDIT: I solved the problem by installing directx9 and vcrun2005 through winetricks that is mentioned here. I did not have to do anything else tho. Only installing directx9 and vcrun2005 sufficed. Also, installing d3d9x instead of directx9 did not work. I had to install directx9 too

the appdb entry only mentions needing devenum.dll and dxdiagn.dll.
so you might try using just

winetricks devenum dxdiagn

instead of 'directx9' (which you usually want to avoid)

That was what I had done at first too. It did not work so I had to install directx9

Will the demise of Wine-staging have much of an effect you think?

Not really. All it did was show an extra panel with a few extra settings.

Also: For those upgrading to WIne 3.0, make sure some of the libs didn't get removed in an autoremove/remove weak depends pass.

Do your equivalent of "sudo dnf history mesa-libGL", or whatever you might think be missing.

Forked by some of the Wine devs here and Staging 3.3 was just released (first since Staging 2.21).

The guide has now been updated for Linux Mint 19 :)