https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37937
--- Comment #9 from Stefan Dösinger stefan@codeweavers.com --- (In reply to Forest from comment #8)
It temporarily filled my screen with a Windows desktop while starting the games. This didn't really break the game, but it sure was ugly, and IMHO a step backwards in terms of integration.
Ya, it's probably not ideal, but I don't see this as a huge problem since your desktop will be filled by the game in a few seconds anyway.
For games that don't run at my desktop's native resolution, it ran the game in a window, defeating the purpose of running full-screen. (I guess this is what you expected would happen.)
Yes. You can try to set your screen resolution to the game res before starting Wine with xrandr (e.g. with a startup script). I haven't tested it myself, but I think it'll do what you want.
In your use case you have a problem in the old way as well. E.g. I'm running Starcraft 1 at 640x480. Now I switch to desktop 2 to check the strategy map, and I'm happy it stays at 640x480 to match maps. Now I receive a mail and want to access my Thunderbird on desktop 3. In 640x480?
Minimizing the game and restoring the screen resolution on focus loss is what Windows does. We don't have to copy every user interface design decision from Windows, but in this case it is required (see e.g. the Thunderbird@640x480 case, also some games wait for the unminimize message to resume operation, bug 23745 may be related to that) and a feature users generally ask for (bugs 15357, 18027). Thus reverting the patch is not the way to go.
Making this a registry key or winecfg option is potentially possible, but we'll need a bigger number of requests for this to justify adding an option, especially since the virtual desktop feature provides this pretty well.