Sway 1.5 Wayland Compositor Released With Adaptive-Sync/VRR, New Protocols

Sway 1.5 is out as a big feature update to this Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager. A big user-facing feature with Sway 1.5 is support for Adaptive Synchronization / Variable Refresh Rate, such as AMD FreeSync.

Up to now the FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync has been principally been in place for the Linux desktop when running on an X.Org session. However, Sway now supports Adaptive-Sync/VRR for reducing stuttering and tearing within games.

Sway 1.5 also adds support for being able to dynamically create headless outputs that in turn can be used with the WayVNC VNC setup or other testing purposes. Sway 1.5 also provides support for Input Method Editors (IME) via the input-method and text-input protocols, support for the Viewporter protocol to help older X11 games, support to inhibit keyboard shortcuts for virtualization / remote desktop use-cases, and support for the wlr-foreign-toplevel-management protocol for custom docks and window switchers.

The Viewporter protocol for Wayland allows for cropping and scaling of surface contents and disconnecting the relationship between the buffer and surface size. Meanwhile the wlr-foreign-toplevel-management protocol exposes a list of opened applications and actions can then be performed on them such as maximizing windows or switching between these windows.

Download links and the complete lengthy change-log for Sway 1.5 can be found via the project's GitHub repository.