Wayland 1.20 Alpha Released With Upstreamed FreeBSD Support, Autotools Nuked

With the plans to release Wayland 1.20 before Christmas, Wayland 1.20 Alpha was released on Thursday to kick off the start of the release process.

Wayland 1.20 will arrive about ten months after Wayland 1.19 and comes at a time when most of the interesting Wayland work is happening in the compositor space or the various support libraries like wlroots and libweston or other components. Wayland 1.20 Alpha does feature upstreamed FreeBSD support that is also now receiving CI coverage for ensuring the Wayland support on this BSD remains in better shape moving forward.

Wayland 1.20 is also dropping its Autotools build system support completely in favor of Meson. The Meson support for Wayland is now mature and goes along with other X.Org/FreeDesktop.org components removing Autotools in favor of focusing on Meson that can be faster and offer better cross-platform support.

Wayland 1.20 Alpha also ships with some minor protocol updates, various bug fixes,and other minor enhancements as outlined in the earlier article.

The list of Wayland 1.20 Alpha changes can be found via release announcement. The Wayland 1.20 Beta is up later this month followed by release candidates until the v1.20.0 release is ready to ship in December.