The Ongoing Work For Native Wine Wayland Support

There were many interesting talks last week at XDC 2023 in Spain around Rusticl, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver, the Raspberry Pi graphics driver, RADV ray-tracing, AMD color management and HDR with the Steam Deck / Gamescope, and others. One of the other talks many Phoronix readers are likely to be interested in is around the state of the Wine Wayland driver.

While most X.Org Developers Conference talks are around graphics drivers / infrastructure work itself, one of the other interesting XDC 2023 talks was Alexandros Frantzis around the ongoing work of providing a native Wine Wayland driver so that this open-source project can interact directly with Wayland and so Windows games/applications running under Linux will no longer need to go through XWayland.

As covered in many Phoronix articles, Wine Wayland remains ongoing. Recently it picked up some basic window management capabilities and other features continue to be worked on and submitted for review by Frantzis. It will be interesting to see how far along the upstream Wine Wayland driver is by the time of the Wine 9.0 stable release early next year.

The hope with this Wine Wayland driver is to avoid the maintenance cost for those still relying on XWayland, avoiding double API transition, improving the performance (particularly for games), and making use of modern Linux desktop features with Wayland. The talk covered Wayland differences and how this driver is going about allowing Win32 software to ultimately work in a Wayland world. It turns out Google has been sponsoring some of this work for the Wine Wayland driver.

Those wishing to learn more about this Wine Wayland effort can see the XDC 2023 presentation embedded below and the accompanied slide deck (PDF).