Proton/WINE compatibility for Linux

[thatsofia]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Games often include CEF, and now WebView2, for their UIs. On Linux, most games are not compiled for Linux and are emulated using WINE, a compatibility layer.

Describe the solution you'd like and alternatives you've considered

For Microsoft to investigate this. I don't know how they'd do this but they must have the resources to do this.

AB#47284355

[jasonstephen15]

WebView2 currently doesn't support linux at this moment, but we do have it on our roadmap. Is this your request? @thatsofia

[thatsofia]

Hello Jason,

Last time I checked, I couldn't run certain software that used Edge WebView2 on my Linux machine using WINE. It'd be great for Microsoft to help the WINE project by investigating why or by even implementing a fix in WINE or in Edge WebView2.

Any other possible optimisations, like linking WebView2 installations together due to sandboxing (due to flatpak, for example), are worth considering, but I do believe that Linux mostly deduplicates Chromium installs.

This is different to native Linux support.

Regards,
Sofia

[jasonstephen15]

My understanding from a quick read is that WINE is a compatibly layer that allows Windows applications to run on Linux. Even though that is not necessarily running WebView2 natively on Linux, it falls under the same end scenario of enabling webview2 based apps to run on unix-based OS, and it would most likely be investigated/scheduled in similar timeline as enabling wv2 on linux. I will make a note of this in our backlog. Will leave this issue open to see if other folks are interested on this type of compatibility/interop technology for linux as well.

[ronoaldo]

Hi! @jasonstephen15 - I would add that Wine (and Valve's Proton) is working very well on devices like the Steam Deck, enabling several games to work on Linux desktops as well. Some games even worked better at launch on Linux because of the Vulkan optimizations at a lower layer that Valve did.

Enabling the Wine/Proton compat would also enable apps like Roblox Studio to properly work on Linux via Wine.

I would say that enabling both native Linux and Wine/Proton support would be amazing, but as far as priority goes, perhaps starting with Wine support can span a wide range of devices and apps.

Thank you for the support!

[AshleyScirra]

For what it's worth... we have a Windows app that is capable of downloading and installing WebView2 if it's missing, and we use it for running games. I ran it with a test game on the Steam Deck and it is actually able to download and run the installer, but it seems to get stuck installing - it doesn't seem to progress past the screen shown below. I guess Wine/Proton need to fix this though (although it would be cool if Microsoft contributed patches to fix it).

[cagnulein]

interested on this too!

[msmalik681]

it would be nice if it worked with linux/wine

[Condemnedfate]

I'm also interested in microsoft making a fix for this

[victorhuangwq]

I do think that this is a valid feature request. So I have added it to be tracked in our backlog, do note that this does not mean any form of prioritization on our end.

[morten71]

I also have several applications that rely on WebView2, that I would very much like to be able to run through wine on linux.