On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Gediminas Jakutis gediminas@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 :).