Experimental Wayland Support For Wine Now Sees More Functionality Working

Back in December there was an experimental driver for native Wayland support within Wine published by Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis. A new version of the Wayland patches for Wine have now been published.

With the new "request for comment" patches, there is now working support for copy/paste, drag-and-drop, and the ability to change the display mode. The patches remain out-of-tree for now and it's not clear if/when it will be ready for mainline. There also is a lack of clarity from upstream Wine developers / CodeWeavers on whether this code should first go through Wine-Staging or what ultimately the acceptance requirements will be for introducing Wayland support into Wine.

At least in the near term, Wine gaming and Windows application usage will be best served in going through XWayland but at least there is this native Wayland driver support being made. More details on the ongoing Wine Wayland work via Collabora's blog and the Wine RFC mailing list announcement.

Hopefully we can see Wayland support buttoned up by the Wine 7.0 stable release early next year. Besides Wine-Staging, it will also be interesting to see if this Wayland support gets picked up earlier by say Proton for Steam Play usage if it ends up leading to efficiency/performance benefits compared to going through XWayland.