Wine with DirectComposition and Direct2D

Modern Windows audio software on Linux.
A Wine fork for the plugin and application GUIs that stock Wine cannot draw.

Full patch documentation · Quick start · Which branch? · Tested applications

_{Cubase Pro 15.0.30 under Wine — the Cubase 14 demo project in playback: arrangement, MixConsole in the lower zone with live meters, MediaBay on the right, on this fork.}

Why this fork exists

Windows audio software stopped drawing itself with GDI years ago. Plugin frameworks — JUCE 8, VSTGUI, SynthEdit/GMPI — and the DAWs that host them now put their user interface on DirectComposition visual trees rendered with Direct2D, text through DirectWrite, presented through DXGI swapchains.

Stock Wine implements very little of that. The result is not a subtle rendering difference: plugin windows come up black, artwork and icons are missing, GUIs flicker, and some applications refuse to start at all because the graphics engine they build on never comes up.

This fork implements the missing pieces. It adds over 30 000 lines to stock Wine, reaching into more than 40 DLLs and programs, and it is used daily for music production rather than kept as a proof of concept.

d2d1 · dcomp · dwrite · dxgi · d3d11 · wined3d · winex11.drv · win32u · uianimation
dwmapi · ntdll · ole32 · msi · crypt32 · comdlg32 · shell32 · advapi32 · wintrust
pwrshsip (new) · powershell.exe · winemenubuilder.exe · and more than twenty others

What it looks like

Serum 2 (VSTGUI + DirectComposition) in FL Studio 2026 — three wavetable oscillators with their wavetable views, the filter response, the envelope, the Rössler chaos LFO and the arpeggiator all render.	Fender Studio Pro 8 (CCL: DXGI + DirectWrite + DComp) — the demo song in playback: arranger sections and the video track in the song view, the floating video player, the console with live meters and the Splice panel docked on the right. Without the UIAnimationManager2 implementation from this fork it does not start at all.
FL Cloud in FL Studio — the plugin store browses with its artwork, products show as installed, and a download runs in place. Installing from it needs the AF_UNIX patches from this fork.	EPROM — Memory Rites (JUCE 8.0.13) in FL Studio 2026 — the preset header, the macro knobs, the artwork panel and the pad row render through JUCE; the splash and login screen before them go through WebView2.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/giang17/wine.git
cd wine
git checkout d2d1-dcomp-11.0     # or the highest-numbered d2d1-dcomp-11.* for rolling release
./configure --prefix=/opt/wine-d2d1 --enable-archs=i386,x86_64
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install

Use a separate --prefix so your distribution's Wine stays untouched. Build both architectures: 32-bit hosts and plugins load d2d1, dcomp and dxgi directly, and a stale 32-bit half keeps running old code without anything visibly failing. This needs the i686-w64-mingw32 cross compiler next to the x86_64 one.

Two things are worth knowing before the first run, both explained in PATCHES.md:

• wine.inf is part of the install. It carries this fork's registry defaults, including the HideWineVersion entries that keep JUCE 8.0.13+ plugins on the Direct2D path instead of its Wine-detecting GDI fallback. Copying DLLs by hand without it fails silently — the plugins simply keep rendering with GDI.
• Do not install DXVK. It replaces dxgi.dll and d3d11.dll and therefore bypasses the composition-swapchain path this fork is built on. It is not needed here, and it brings no measured benefit for this class of application.

Details, tuning and font setup: PATCHES.md.

Which branch?

Branch	Base	For whom
d2d1-dcomp-11.0	wine-11.0 stable	Most users. The full stack on the stable release, actively maintained. This is the default branch.
d2d1-dcomp-11.<N>	newest WineHQ devel tag	Rolling-release users (wine-tkg-dev and similar). The same stack rebased onto the newest devel tag roughly every two weeks. Always take the highest-numbered d2d1-dcomp-11.* branch; lower numbers are superseded snapshots. Plugin-tested before each push.
d2d1-v6	wine-11.0	Deprecated since 2026-05-03. The original upstream-targeted D2D1-only series, kept for reference.

Tested applications

Everything below is exercised on this fork, not inferred from code. The long form — what exactly each one needs, and what breaks without it — is in PATCHES.md.

Application	Framework	Status
Steinberg Cubase Pro 15.0.30	Custom (DComp + D2D1 + DirectWrite), WebView2 Hub	Installs through Steinberg's own bootstrapper and runs: project window, MixConsole with live meters, Hub. Installing needs the msi feature-cost fix (the setup crashed before its first dialog) and the Script SIP for signed PowerShell — without pwrshsip/wintrust the installer stops at "preinstall.ps1 … not trusted". Starting needs the Windows.Globalization.Calendar stub, without which headtracking.dll aborts behind the licence splash, and the comdlg32 folder-dialog fix, without which the Hub reports the project folder as read-only. The window itself needs the dcomp virtual-surface resize and child-surface readback work — and the d2d1 WIC target fix, without which the MixConsole level meters stay empty
Serum 2 (VST3 in Reaper)	VSTGUI + DComp	Fully functional — all waveform views, envelopes, presets, per-pixel-alpha drag bitmaps
Korg Trinity / Prophecy (VST3)	JUCE 8.0.13 / 8.0.12 + DComp	Fully functional on the DComp path
Pianoteq 9 (standalone + VST3)	JUCE 8.0.10 + DComp	Fully functional
Ableton Live 12 (Intro / Lite)	Custom (D3D11 + WebView2)	Fully functional — decorations, move/resize, fullscreen, Splice view
FL Studio 2026	Custom	Runs without xruns at 64 samples / 48 kHz; Cloud plugins install and stream
Fender Studio Pro 8	CCL (DXGI + DWrite + DComp)	Fully functional — needs the UIAnimationManager2 implementation to start at all
EPROM — Memory Rites, Minimal Audio Current / Evoke / Lucid (VST3)	JUCE 8.0.13 (+ WebView2)	Fully functional with the HideWineVersion entry
Native Access 3.25.2, Kontakt 8 Player	Electron/Chromium, InstallAware/MSI	Install, sign in and run — need the powershell and msi patches from this fork
VProm3 (VST3)	SynthEdit/GMPI + D2D1	Fully functional, correct colours (needs the Color Management effect)
SynthEdit 1.5	Custom engine (D2D1 + winex11 client surfaces)	Fully functional — the MDI canvas draws completely and stays stable through menus, resizes and moves
UVI Portal, Minimal Hub	WebView2, Tauri v2	Install, sign in and update products; Minimal Hub needs the schannel DecryptMessage fix for incomplete messages, which this branch carries — without it its oauth/token request stops after a partial response and the app waits forever

What the fork changes

One line per area; PATCHES.md has the reasoning, the measurements and the switches for each.

• D2D1 — geometry pipeline (arcs, constrained Delaunay triangulation, miter limits, shader antialiasing, correct stroke joins, cubic Bézier subdivision), PushLayer stencil clipping, layers on opaque targets, Color Management effect and sRGB formats for SynthEdit/GMPI, Gaussian blur, bitmap-brush WRAP/MIRROR, line batching (Serum 2's wavetable view: 1 060 ms → about 80 ms)
• DComp — IDCompositionDesktopDevice with a D2D1 bitmap rendering path, dirty-rect clipping, IDCompositionDevice3/4/5, composition and dynamic textures, D3D11 BeginDraw, rootless visual trees composited at ~60 Hz, cross-process targets, backdrop capture, and leaf visuals composited into the frame instead of blitted after it (Studio Pro's playhead: missing in 14.9 % of frames before, 0.0 % after)
• DirectWrite — NATURAL_SYMMETRIC rendering mode, IDWriteFontSet::GetMatchingFonts, font fallback for Miscellaneous Symbols and Geometric Shapes, a glyph cache that outlives the fontface (a 25 s resize re-rasterised 196 distinct glyphs 111 598 times before), and ClearType-style subpixel text
• DXGI / D3D11 / WineD3D — composition swapchains, FLIP_SEQUENTIAL preservation, DComp popup handling, monitored fences, ID3D11Fence with CPU timeline semantics, GL buffer recycling (70 % RSS reduction), GL present for top-level windows
• winex11 / dwmapi / win32u — DComp window support, per-pixel alpha for GPU-painted layered windows, correct handling of ownerless tool-window popups (sticky, wrongly decorated plugin menus on KDE), no black expose flash while a client window renders offscreen
• Everything an installer needs — msi string pool and feature cost, Script SIP for signed PowerShell (pwrshsip, wintrust, msisip), a usable powershell.exe, IShellLink::GetPath short paths, MiniDumpWriteDump module lists. Unglamorous, but it is the difference between an application that installs and one that does not

Running in the wild

Independent reports in this repository's issue tracker cover three GPU vendors — NVIDIA, AMD (RADV) and Intel integrated graphics — Arch/CachyOS installations, Hyprland on Wayland next to X11 sessions, and Bitwig hosting plugins through yabridge as well as standalone applications.

One of them (#5) is worth reading as a comparison: for that application stock Wine 11.12 produced a 1×1 black window, three DXVK versions each aborted during graphics initialisation, and this fork's builtin dxgi/d3d11 brought up a working, responsive GUI. Another (#3) runs JUCE 8 plugins on an Intel iGPU with no discrete GPU at all.

The fork is also the base of shibco/ableton-linux, which builds Ableton Live 12 production setups on top of it.

Relationship to upstream Wine

This is a fork of wine-mirror/wine, not a replacement for it. Small, self-contained fixes go to WineHQ as ordinary merge requests on gitlab.winehq.org and several have been merged there. The large DirectComposition and Direct2D work stays here, where it can be rebased onto every devel tag and tested against real plugins every two weeks.

The upstream Wine README — build requirements, configuration, documentation, where to get support for Wine itself — is kept unchanged as README.wine.

Problems, questions, contributions

Open an issue. For a rendering problem the two most useful things are the application and plugin framework involved, and whether the HideWineVersion entry applies to your host — with JUCE 8.0.13 and newer that one switch decides whether the plugin renders with Direct2D or falls back to GDI, and the GDI fallback is what a "the GUI is black" report usually turns out to be.

Credits

• Subpixel text rendering: Cade (@shibco), shibco/ableton-linux pull request 155, reviewed there by @ClickSentinel
• --enable-archs packaging form for Bottles: @jibeape
• Related discussion: yabridge#413

License

Same as Wine — GNU LGPL. See LICENSE.