The Wine development team have made version 1.6 available after 16 months of hard work. There are about 10,000 different changes. Highlights include the new Mac driver, complete support for window transparency and a new package for mono. NET support.
Let's start with the practical part: installing WIne 1.6. There is a PPA and is thus completely free of pain and with the usual triple jump:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.6

Personally it i had Wine 1.6-rc5 installed, but this version should not have much (if any) differ from the final one.

Those who prefer to install it via source code, you can find it at sourceforge.net or ibiblio.org . You can find installation instructions for many distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD, PC-BSD) in the download section of the project page, obtaining the code from git is also possible: www.winehq.org/git.

What's new in Wine 1.6

The list is very long and there is a detailed changelog in the official announcement. I have highlighted some here:

• Window transparency support, including both color keying and alpha blending transparency;
• All window rendering is now done on the client-side using the DIB engine (except for OpenGL rendering). This means that rendering to windows or bitmaps gives identical results;
• X11 server-side font rendering is no longer supported. All fonts are rendered client-side using FreeType;
• There are significant performance improvements in the DIB engine, particularly for text rendering, bitmap stretching, alpha blending, and gradients;
• Sub-pixel font anti-aliasing is now supported in the DIB engine, using the system anti-aliasing configuration from FontConfig;
• Raw input support for keyboard and mouse;
• There is a joystick applet in the control panel, to allow configuring joysticks and testing their behavior;
• Support for Randr 1.2 and 1.3;
• DOSBox is tried first when running a DOS application. The Wine DOS support is only used as a fallback when DOSBox cannot be found, and will be removed in a future release;
• Wine can now be configured to report the Windows version as 'Windows 8';
• The Mono runtime is packaged as an MSI file, and its installation can be managed from the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel. It is automatically installed on Wine prefix updates;
• The Microsoft .NET 4.0 runtime can be installed for cases where Mono is not good enough yet;
• HTTPS connections use GnuTLS (or Secure Transport on Mac OS X). OpenSSL is no longer used;
• The Direct3D 9Ex implementation is more complete;
• Improvements to various parts of the D3DX9 and Direct3D 10 implementations;
• Audio device enumeration has been improved, and multi-channel devices are better supported;
• VMR-9 video rendering has been implemented;
• On Linux, dynamic device management supports the UDisks2 service;
• Building Wine for the ARM64 platform is now supported;
• Preliminary support for building Wine for Android using the Android NDK;
• A native Mac OS X driver has been implemented, for better integration with the Mac desktop environment. The full range of driver features are supported, including OpenGL, window management, clipboard, drag & drop, system tray, etc.

Post your experience with Wince 1.6 in the comment box below.