Notes From WineConf 2018: x86 On ARM Progress, Wine-Staging Needs More Help

Taking place last week in The Hague, Netherlands, was the WineConf 2018 conference. This year's WineConf -- on top of the usual annual discussions about this open-source project for running Windows games/applications on Linux/macOS -- took the time to celebrate the project's 25th anniversary.

While no slides/recordings have yet to be posted, SUSE's Marcus Meissner has provided his notes from the event. The rough highlights come down to:

- CodeWeavers continues employing around half of the Wine developers. Their business is currently going well with CrossOver as well as contract-based porting work.

- There were discussions around Wine-Staging and about accepting some of that work upstream. The Wine-Staging developers could use more help wrangling patches.

- An update on the x86 on ARM emulation status as well as for 32-bit x86 binaries on 64-bit x86. With macOS set to strip out 32-bit x86 support in 2019, the Wine developers have more pressure for ensuring a good 32-bit on 64-bit x86 experience. At WineConf 2018, the Worms x86 game was shown on a Tegra-based NVIDIA Shield while Notepad++ and Age of Empires was shown from an Android phone.

- An update was shared on the current Wine Vulkan architecture as well as to the Wine Direct3D architecture.

- An effort to improve the packaging around Wine to get more responsive packaging for some distributions. Two more Wine contributors stepped up to help with packaging and also looking at the openSUSE Build Service.

Marcus' WineConf2018 notes can be read on the mailing list.