Wine On Wayland This Year Aims For OpenGL Support, Window Minimization

While there is the initial Wine Wayland driver found in the recently minted Wine 9.0 stable release, the driver isn't yet complete for offering a native Wayland experience for Windows games and applications running on Linux.

There still are a number of Wine Wayland features missing from window minimization and other window management support to finishing OpenGL support, clipboard and drag and drop functionality, and various other features. Alexandros Frantzis with Collabora who has been leading the Wine Wayland driver work wrote a blog post briefly summarizing their 2023 accomplishments. That is mostly a repeat for those reading Phoronix and/or keeping up to tabs on the bi-weekly Wine development releases. But for their 2024 plans is an interesting bit to share.

Among the Wine Wayland plans this year shared by developer Alexandros Frantzis are:

- Emulation of display mode changes through compositor scaling
- OpenGL support
- Improved positioning of transient windows (popups, menus, etc)
- Even more window management (e.g., minimization)
- Clipboard and drag-and-drop
- General robustness improvements, bug fixes, code improvements

Some other features that would be great to have eventually:

- Support for system DPI auto-detection and, ideally, per-monitor DPI handling in Wine core
- Integration with the upcoming Wayland color-management (and hdr) protocol
- Cross-process rendering

It will be interesting to see how quickly the rest of these Wine Wayland features materialize in the Wine 9.xx development releases ahead of Wine 10.0 debuting in early 2025.