I currently have a dual-monitor setup running NVidia Twinview on a GeForce GTX 280. My window manager is XFCE. When I run fullscreen games in Wine, they take up the whole primary monitor and when they don't capture the mouse, I can move freely to my other monitor to use whatever (Web browser or IM client usually). This is great, and pretty much seamless.

The problem comes when said game chooses to minimize itself when it loses focus. Not only does this not allow me to do something else while keeping an eye on some in-game activity, but often the act of minimizing/maximizing takes a little while and freezes up the UI until it finishes (depending on game).

Some examples of games that do this are Homeworld and the Half-Life 2 series. An example of a game that doesn't (thankfully) is Guild Wars.

I realize this is by design, for whatever reason, and Googling seems to reveal that there's not really a solution in Windows short of running the game in windowed mode if available. What I want to know is, can anyone think of a solution for Wine in Linux? It's certainly not a show-stopper, but is quite annoying especially when I get used to being able to smoothly transition in some games.

One possibility that I've thought of but not tried is to run two separate X servers instead of Twinview. I don't like that solution since for every other time, I want one seamless desktop, and don't particularly want to jump through some hoops to change modes whenever I want to play one of these games.

So, in the hopes that someone might be able to come up with something, I'm throwing this out there. Any suggestions?

Have you tried Wine's virtual desktop option (in graphics tab in Winecfg tool)?

The problem you describe is how the game is designed. It expects exclusive mode on input devices or the screen, and when it doesn't have it, it thinks it needs to minimize.

While this might work, it's not really any better than a game-supported windowed mode.

I realize this is by design (as I have stated), but since the game was also designed to run in Windows, and it is now not doing that either, that is by no means the end of it.

I was kind of hoping there would be some trick to make Wine or X or something be able to either pretend it isn't unfocusing the window, or to just prevent the minimize call the game makes to the window manager.