http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11899
--- Comment #3 from Eric erpo41@gmail.com 2008-03-08 06:48:37 ---
A long time ago you could set a Wine desktop per application but these days that isn't possible anymore and this ability won't return. The reason is that these days Wine's GUI rendering works more like Windows and Windows doesn't offer this ability and inside our design we can't offer it either. (The desktop is managed by explorer.exe like on Windows)
wine explorer.exe /desktop=name_for_desktop1,800x600 appname1.exe
If I set wine to use managed windows without a virtual desktop in winecfg, I can run an instance of UltraVNC with managed windows. I can then use the above command to run StarCraft.exe in a virtual desktop at the same time.
I don't understand why this bug was marked RESOLVED with status INVALID.
According to the resolution explanation page, INVALID means that the described behavior is not a bug. However, as was demonstrated by my bug report and by bug # 11078, it's a real problem when a user can't set the "emulate a virtual desktop" bit on a per-program basis.
Even if it were impossible to set the "emulate a virtual desktop" bit on a per-program basis without different wineprefixes, it would still be a problem deserving a solution. Maybe the solution would be to make it easy to create different wineprefixes. I don't know. The point is that a solution would need to be found.
But, it turns out that wine can already do this. I don't see why a user should have to know about explorer.exe's /desktop switch in order to access this functionality.
I'll attach a screenshot in case anyone doesn't believe it's possible to do what's described above.