Hello!
My name is Gediminas Jakutis. I study Informatics Engineering [bachelor / undergraduate] at Kaunas University of Technology, second year. I wish to try out GSoC for the first time by helping to improve Wine. My primary programming language is C. I am self-taught in C, but I believe my knowledge is good enough. I am quite familiar with Wine - I use it and experiment with it for many years now. I am subscribed to and read wine-devel for more than a year. I browse through Wine's source code once in a while out of curiosity. Thus, I have some knowledge of its structure. Sadly, I have not written any patches for Wine yet. Mostly due to lack of confidence.
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 case this turns out to be too easy of a project, I could implement some way to perform "alt-tabbing" between programs in a VD and/or an optional (enable-able in winecfg) rudimentary taskbar for changing/checking focus.
I am very excited about participating in GSoC. And even more excited about starting to contribute to Wine by writing patches! Regardless if I get accepted or not, I wish to make Wine better. Thus, expect me to start submitting patches in the future even if I do not get accepted. ;]
Sincerely, Gediminas Jakutis
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