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What to Expect From Wine on Wayland in 2024

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Collabora, the company responsible for developing Wine's Wayland driver and getting it into Wine proper, has just published Wine on Wayland: A year in review (and a look ahead).

So far, they've landed support in Wine for Wayland in these areas:

  • Basic window management (fullscreen, maximization, resize, etc)
  • Software rendering (i.e., GDI)
  • Mouse support, including mouselook
  • Keyboard support, including keymap handling
  • Vulkan, including Direct3D through WineD3D/Vulkan or DXVK
  • Basic support for HiDPI

In 2024, Collabora wants to focus on upstreaming support in these areas:

  • 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

And once those are out of the way, these features 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's possible to enable the still-experimental driver if your Wine build supports it by editing the Wine registry.

Either way, the Wayland driver is a big deal. With RHEL going so far as to deprecate X11, we've seen a lot of developments across the Linux space in supporting Wayland recently.

Have you tried the Wayland driver already? What features does it need before you would consider using it in place of the XWayland version? OpenGL support seems like a big one. Or are you sticking with X11 for the foreseeable future?

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I started using Linux in 2020. I'm a visual novel aficionado with an appreciation for indie games. I can also be found playing big-budget multiplayer games with friends. The day Rainbow Six: Siege's anti-cheat works in Proton will be the day all my gaming is done on Linux.
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based Jan 31
Last I tried it mid 2023 on KDE, windows flashed and had other graphical bugs on 3060Ti so I went back. I'll prolly stay on x11 till I get trouble with it


Last edited by based on 31 January 2024 at 9:59 am UTC
I'll use whatever Proton, Bottles, Heroic, and Lutris defaults to. I've followed the Wine Wayland effort here and there. It flies above my head and I don't even know what is and isn't working in the latest Staging and Stable version (and add what version of Wine that Proton and Proton-GE uses to that equation).

So, I'll wait, and use the default, whatever that default is. I'm already on Wayland anyways, and uBlue/Bazzite teams are good about communicating to their users as well as providing workarounds, so they should help mitigate or make more accessible regardless of what the launchers choose to ship.
whizse Jan 31
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Lots of fun stuff to look forward to! Thanks for the article pleasereadthemanual!

I'll probably try it every once in a while until it becomes the default. The nice thing about running separate prefixes is that you can turn the Wayland driver on for specific things, where it starts working sooner, and keep using the X11 driver for the rest.
Shmerl Jan 31
I tried it, but it has an annoying bug - you sometimes get half refresh rate on the monitor while game has double the framerate.

It's some subtle bug between Wine, KWin, radv (Mesa) and amdgpu (kernel). I'll revisit it once KDE Plasma 6.0 comes out, since it has a major KWin overhaul and it might be a waste of time chasing that bug before that.


Last edited by Shmerl on 31 January 2024 at 9:03 pm UTC
robredz Feb 1
Just get uncontrolled flicker on one screen in a dual screen set up even with both screens set to same refresh in Wayland, witha RTX 3090-
will be sticking with XII for now.
FoxSteven Feb 2
What I only want is using Adobe Product on linux......
Quoting: FoxStevenWhat I only want is using Adobe Product on linux......
Yeah. Although what I really really want is alternatives to Adobe products that work about as well, because I really dislike Adobe. Specifically for fiddling with .pdfs, I have no need for anything more powerful for image stuff than the GIMP and various other already available open source things.
14 Feb 3
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The next time I plan on trying out Wayland on the main tower is KDE Plasma 6. Wayland has been on the laptop for a long time now, and I cannot remember any nuisances there.
Quoting: FoxStevenWhat I only want is using Adobe Product on linux......
You and me both.

I tried out photoshop.adobe.com this week, because they finally released it publicly a few months back (though I used it during the beta). I couldn't resize the canvas. There's no option to do that like in desktop Photoshop. So I tried cropping it, but it just errored out. I spent an hour with a support agent, and it turned out it can't handle large files (I was working with a 135MB PSD).

I thought it was okay aside from...well, that. I didn't hit any other limitations, but to be fair, I had only used it for an hour.

What I really want is Adobe inDesign on the web and After Effects...somehow on the web or working through Wine. One of those is more likely than the other.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah. Although what I really really want is alternatives to Adobe products that work about as well, because I really dislike Adobe. Specifically for fiddling with .pdfs, I have no need for anything more powerful for image stuff than the GIMP and various other already available open source things.
Have you tried acrobat.adobe.com? I haven't, so this is a genuine question

Affinity Photo apparently works in Wine so long as you transfer some files from a Windows installation. Aside from that, there's Master PDF and a few other Linux PDF editors. I haven't tried them, so I have no idea if they're any good.
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah. Although what I really really want is alternatives to Adobe products that work about as well, because I really dislike Adobe. Specifically for fiddling with .pdfs, I have no need for anything more powerful for image stuff than the GIMP and various other already available open source things.
Have you tried acrobat.adobe.com? I haven't, so this is a genuine question
No. I only get halfway serious with .pdf for work, and at work we've got subscriptions to Adobe Creative Cloud, which has nothing to do with a cloud, you just download the software. It was the only software I've ever used at work where systems people had to come down and walk me through the process of getting access--not because I called them up or was having particular trouble or anything, just because they had to do this with everybody who needed to use the damn thing. Basically although we bought X many licenses or whatever, every single person had to log into their website which I guess they're calling a cloud even though it's just a server you're downloading their software from, and authenticate directly with them as a person who's allowed to get their software, I guess so they can track you specifically and presumably turn it off if you try to keep using it after the subscription is over . . .

Anyway, I think they're assholes. But I can't currently get away from them. A couple years ago during Covid I was working from home from my Linux desktop, and everything else was fine--LibreOffice was fine for the office stuff, our library system is browser based etc., but no Linux things I tried would do what I wanted with .pdf files. Luckily there was a remote desktop setup thing, so I was able to use Acrobat via that, but that was the only thing I needed to do that for. Master PDF, you say? Hadn't heard of that, I should give it a shot.
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