CodeWeavers Working On Better Input Device Support For Proton Gaming

The Wine developers at CodeWeavers who also collaborate with Valve on Steam Play's Proton have been working to enhance input device support for Proton/Wine gaming. In particular, for various gaming input devices that were never designed with Linux support in mind and various nuances around properly supporting them under Linux with different limitations from (X)Wayland to kernel driver handling.

Arek Hiler of CodeWeavers, who also serves as the Proton janitor, presented last week at the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC 2024) in Montreal about the input device challenges and their hopes to enhancing the support.

Hiler went over the various input device handling challenges, how the Wine Wayland driver will improve some areas of support, the HIDIOCREVOKE ioctl being introduced in Linux 6.12, and other ongoing efforts as well as open issues.

For those interested in input devices and/or enhancements ongoing by CodeWeavers to benefit Proton/Wine gaming, below is the XDC 2024 presentation recording for all of the details. There is also a PDF slide deck.