Wine-Staging 7.8 Improves Alt+Tab Handling For Unity Games

It's been a while since there was last a Wine-Staging update with notable new patches added for this experimental version of Wine. But with today's Wine-Staging 7.8 release based off yesterday's Wine 7.8 there is a new patch worth mentioning as well as updates to some of the existing patches.

Wine-Staging 7.8 is out today and comes in at 550 patches on top of what is found in the upstream Wine code. Wine-Staging is a bit lighter for this two week cycle period thanks to some Wine server patches making their way upstream. Wine-Staging continues to serve as more the experimental/bleeding-edge and "proving grounds" version for Wine users for running the latest Windows games and applications on Linux.

The new patch with Wine-Staging 7.8 is actually picking up a patch started in 2019 and designed to improve the alt+tab handling for Unity games and potentially other games too. The issue stems from this 2019 bug report seen since at least Wine 4.20 over alt+tab problems with Unity games in that OnApplicationFocus/OnApplicationPause events are not triggered on focus regain. David Torok who reported the 2019 bug also attached a "proof of concept" patch that was adding in one new line of code.

Fast forward to 2022, Wine users are still reporting alt+tab troubles for various games running on Unity Engine both on that bug report and other duplicate bug reports. Wine-Staging 7.8 has now picked up Torok's one-liner patch to the win32u input code. The fix is sending off a "WM_NCPOINTERUP" message on focus regain. With that simple patch, alt+tab handling for at least Unity games should now behave according to what gamers expect.

Wine-Staging 7.8 also updates patches around Wine's X11 NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW handling, raw input mouse code, API iteration tokens, and other patches.

Those wanting to download the latest Wine or Wine-Staging builds can do so over on WineHQ.org.