Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis introduces an experimental Wayland driver for the Windows compatibility layer Wine. For the graphical display of apps in Linux, Wine usually interacts as a client with the X server. However, Linux desktop environments increasingly rely on the Wayland protocol instead of X 11. For this reason, Wine previously had to use Xwayland as an intermediate step in order to pass content through to the Wayland compositor. The Wayland driver for Wine now presented makes this step superfluous

The Wayland driver for Wine is at an early stage. On the Collabora website, Frantzis gives an overview of the development status. Up until now, GDI and OpenGL / DirectX applications have run on one display. Users can set the windows to full screen, resize and maximize, but not minimize them. In addition to mouse inputs, keyboard inputs are also possible, but so far only in the QWERTY layout.

Well-received These first successes prompted Frantzis to present the driver on the “wine-devel” mailing list and to ask for feedback and assessments. The Wine developers initially welcomed the contribution and are now advising whether and how the driver can be integrated into the Wine code.

A short video on the Collabora Youtube channel shows some programs that already work with the Wayland driver, including Windows Explorer, Gimp, Firefox and the game “The Batttle for Wesnoth”. Frantzis announces the intention to cooperate with another open source project that works on the compatibility of Wine with the graphic API Vulkan in Wayland mode.

Interested parties can find more information in the announcement on the Collabora website. The discussion about the Wayland driver can be followed on the Wine mailing list.

(ndi)