Alexandros Frantzis is a senior software engineer at Collabora.
2023 was a great year for the Wayland driver for Wine. The goal was to move forward from the experimental phase and make the driver a proper upstream component. A year later, after several merge requests, many people are now already able to use the latest Wine release to enjoy some of their favourite Windows applications in a completely X11-free environment. So far, we have in upstream basic window management, such as fullscreen, maximisation and resize, software rendering, Vulkan support, including Direct3D through WineD3D/ Vulkan or DXVK, and basic support for HiDPI scaling.
While the recent release of Wine 9.0 did bring an experimental Wayland driver, our work is far from done. Our upstreaming efforts will continue in 2024, with a focus on multiple key features including emulation of display mode changes through compositor scaling, OpenGL support, improved positioning of transient windows (pop-ups, menus and so on) and even more window management.
If you’re curious to see what all this progress looks like, there are several videos out there made by people using the Wayland driver (which is very exciting to see), so I’ll let those speak for themselves.