Today, Collabora provides us with a quick glimpse and a future outlook on the ongoing improvements on the Wine driver for Wayland, as well as highlighting some desirable features that might be beneficial.
The first appearance of the Wine driver for Wayland was marked by the Wine 9.0 launch. This free and open-source compatibility layer allows apps and games designed for Windows platforms to run on Unix-like operating systems.
Despite its experimental stage, the Wayland driver for Wine offers elementary features for window management such as full-screen mode, maximization, resizing, and so on. It also supports software rendering, mouse and keyboard inputs (encompassing mouselook and keymap handling), basic HiDPI support, and Vulkan support (inclusive of Direct3D through WineD3D/Vulkan or DXVK).
By 2024, Collabora plans to add a range of new features to its Wayland driver for Wine. This includes OpenGL support, display mode change emulation via compositor scaling, window minimization support, clipboard utilization, drag-and-drop facility, enhanced positioning for temporary windows (e.g., popups, menus, etc.), and overall robustness enhancements.
“Our goal was to move forward from the experimental phase and make the driver a proper upstream component. A year later, after several merge requests, many people are now already able to use the latest Wine release to enjoy some of their favorite Windows applications in a completely X11-free environment,” writes Alexandros Frantzis in a blog post.
In addition to the work they plan to implement throughout 2024, Collabora also hopes to work on other features that would be great to have eventually, including support for system DPI auto-detection, per-monitor DPI handling in Wine core, cross-process rendering, and integration with the upcoming Wayland color-management (and HDR) protocol.
Those of you who want to test the Wayland driver in Wine 9.0 need to enable it via the HKCUSoftwareWineDrivers registry key by running the wine reg.exe add HKCU\Software\Wine\Drivers /v Graphics /d x11,wayland command and then unset the DISPLAY environment variable.
Image credits: Collabora
Last updated 4 hours ago