Fix for black-window JUCE 8 VST plugin GUIs (Serum 2, etc.) under Wine on Arch & CachyOS
If you've installed a VST plugin recently and its GUI is just a black window under Wine/yabridge -- that's the JUCE 8 Direct2D/DirectComposition issue. Stock Wine doesn't implement the render path JUCE 8 switched to, so there's nothing to draw into. The tell-tale sign, if you launch from a terminal:
DCompositionCreateDevice failed: Not implemented. (0x80004001)
First, a caveat: if the plugin you want has a native Linux build, just use that (Pianoteq, for example) — this is only for Windows-only JUCE 8 plugins like Serum 2.
There is a fix — giang17 wrote Wine patches that implement the missing bits — but building patched Wine and wiring it into yabridge for just one plugin (without disturbing your other plugins) is fiddly. So I packaged it for Arch/CachyOS and wrote up the whole thing, including a prebuilt binary so you can skip the ~40-min compile, and the yabridge dispatcher trick that routes only the patched plugin to the patched Wine:
Full guide + prebuilt binary: https://github.com/mklnln/wine-d2d1-dcomp
Not on the AUR (new registrations are frozen after the June 2026 malware wave), so it's install-straight-from-the-repo for now — instructions are in the README.
All credit for the actual fix goes to giang17; I just packaged it and wrote it down. Happy to answer questions here, but anything about the patches themselves is best directed at their repo.