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.
The entire presentation is available on YouTube.
I love Wine, and I’m glad the attitude isn’t just “it doesn’t work on Wayland, too bad.” I want Wine to stick around and get even better. Wine has become the stable Linux application compatibility layer, because, like with a game console, the entire point of the Wine project is to provide a stable environment for software to run, and not break things. It’s easier to get many older games to run in Wine than it is to get the native Linux versions working, which is beyond hilarious.
kbd,
I agree. The world would be a better place if every project strived for minimal politics and just deliver real solutions as best they can!
Hmm, I certainly still experience compatibility problems with wine. I do think the developers are doing a great job all things considered, The progress has been impressive with thousands and thousands of titles working great without much tweaking. But there are games and software that still won’t run under wine so I think people should understand that it is hit and miss.
I don’t own many linux titles, but those I do have worked fine for me natively. Not sure if I’ve just been lucky? In my experience it’s shared dependencies that are most at risk of breaking linux software, but IMHO native games built on well supported cross platform frameworks are likely to be well supported.
In theory any applications using X specific toolkits like xcb, xlib could be at risk of breaking if distros pull the plug on xwayland, but who knows when that will happen. Ideally I’d like to see everyone move to vulkan for cross platform support.