[GSoC] My proposal for GSoC 2013

[Austin English]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Gediminas Jakutis
<gediminas at varciai.lt> wrote:
> Hello!
> For GSoC, I am suggesting my own idea. In case this idea is not good,
> I am open to changing it, thinking of a new one, or adopting one.
> My idea: I have noticed that Wine's virtual desktop feature is very
> limited - if the first program on a prefix starts without a virtual
> desktop, all programs launched during the same session also start
> without a VD, disregarding any VD settings and/or requests with
> environment variables. And vice versa - if the first program starts
> inside a VD, all other programs in that sessions start in the VD.
> Often, this can be worked around by using separate Wine prefixes. Yet
> sometimes, this workaround is not possible. A good example: steam and
> games that only run properly in a VD. This forces the user to start
> steam in a VD and makes steam itself unusable while a game is running,
> especially if the game does not support the steam overlay. I would
> like to fix this limitation and make it possible to properly choose to
> run different programs on one prefix with or without a VD regardless
> what was chosen to programs already running in that prefix. I can
> already see this requiring changes in the winecfg utility, by the way.

In addition to Vincent's comments, note that you _can_ set up virtual
desktops for certain apps but not others within a single WINEPREFIX
(though Steam may not like this, I haven't tried it myself).

There's a bit more info at
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-dba86ae589dca54a116a3fc21f6237af45e8119c.

This has been in Wine for quite a while...a significant part of Summer
of Code is researching potential ideas before proposing them. Though
you did start early, so you have plenty of time to find other ideas
:).

-- 
-Austin