from Hacker News

Wine Wayland Driver

by rom-antics on 2/25/23, 3:23 PM with 103 comments

• by rjzzleep on 2/25/23, 4:25 PM

  Funny, I was literally just looking at this issue today. I switched to wayland a few weeks ago, just because it seems to save a lot of battery power. But so much basic functionality is still broken it's infuriating. And then so many things seem to follow the "unix functionality" and as a result they're half baked tools that aren't really working properly IMHO.

  A lot of these issues have fixes or workarounds directly in KDE.

  For reference I'm using sway. swayidle is an idle daemon, where the maintainer doesn't think that it matters whether its connected to power or not. You're supposed to create your own scripts around it that handles ac connect and disconnects.

  There's a tool to do flux like color warmth setting. One of them doesn't allow you to toggle, so you have create your own toggle script that kills or restarts it. The other one is controllable, but doesn't actually account for time or timezone.

  XWayland has had 2 or 3 patches to handle hidpi when the main wayland screen has fractional scaling, none of them are merged and they seem hardly active. KDE works around that by allowing you to turn it off for xwayland clients. Sway just passes it down and blurs everything.

  When I exit a wayland session and then restart it the screen locks up. This doesn't happen with normal X.

  And then there is electron. Slack is not the only app that ignores electron settings and doesn't run with wayland support. In chrome and electron it's supposedly supported but you have to toggle it yourself? What is this madness?

  These things seem like basic functionality for me. I don't really get it. Sure, maybe I shouldn't expect a proper experience for random sway tools, so that makes the first two points irrelevant. But the fact that years in they still haven't found a proper solution on passing down hidpi for xwayland? That's incomprehensible for me.

• by justin_ on 2/25/23, 4:44 PM

  Weirdly, I was just thinking about this earlier today. Years ago, Wine developers basically refused to add Wayland support. They told the Wayland devs that they'd stick with X11 and XWayland. Why? Because X11 and Win32 specify position windows in absolute screen coordinates, whereas Wayland positions windows relative to their parents. This broke some assumptions across the Wine project about positioning windows, and it didn't seem worth it to fix[0][1]. (And there may have been other issues. I'm not an expert).

  Even when the driver was being developed around 2021, it seems like the Wine developers only begrudgingly accepted it[2].

  Exciting to see this finally hitting upstream. Progress in desktop Linux often seems slow, but things are moving forward.

  [0] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42284#c1

  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127952

  [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Julliard-Wayland-2021

• by csdvrx on 2/25/23, 4:53 PM

  This falls right on time for my 2023 "Linux on the desktop" attempt! (now I wish https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11 had a Wayland option...)

  I can't live without Office! My personal favorite is 2010 x64, as Word then starts faster than the current Wordpad.

  Office 2010 works great in Windows 11, but there've been some suspicious move making me believe old office version will be given a poison pill or something under the plausible deniability of "security risks of 13 year old software", like how Outlook 2010 can't connect to outlook.com anymore (though it works great with gmail using google's GWSO plugin)

  On MY computer, I run what I want. So I'll try Office 2010 in wine within Wayland.

• by jchw on 2/25/23, 4:37 PM

  I've been running these patches to play around with them and it seems pretty good; layered windows (WS_EX_LAYERED) work great, and the issue you would have with non-reparenting X11/XWayland WMs (mostly the mouse cursor being offset) is gone. There's still some minor quirks remaining, so it's not perfect, but a complex program like FL Studio seems to work just fine, as does some games using Wined3d.

  The only thing I really hit that would be nice to fix is that it appears tablet support isn't in yet, or at least it didn't work for me. Of course, tablet support is a thing I generally wish could be improved in Wine, especially because Windows apps are slowly moving towards more modern APIs than the old wintab32 defacto standard.

• by mouse_ on 2/25/23, 3:33 PM

  Neat, good seeing progress on this front.

  Many Windows applications since Windows 7 support fractional scaling natively (125%, 150%). Is there any way of accessing these modes with WINE? Is this really the same thing as simply setting the font DPI scale (which is what the WINE docs suggest doing)?

• by subarctic on 2/25/23, 6:56 PM

  can someone explain what is going on here? i know what wine is, it's a thing that lets you play windows games on linux or macos, but what is wayland?

• by wheelerof4te on 2/25/23, 7:48 PM

  We are still fixing stuff in Wayland, stuff that Microsoft and Apple had figured out 20 years ago.

  So defeating.

• by shmerl on 2/26/23, 12:43 AM

  Good to see it's approaching merging!

  I ran a few tests and it works for games well already, but there are still some issues to iron out. I'll run more tests once it's upstreamed.

• by sprash on 2/25/23, 5:04 PM

  Since this isn't a community effort at all but purely done by a consultant agency called Collabora my question would be, who is funding them?