Weston 11.0 Alpha Released With Many Improvements For This Wayland Compositor

Weston 11.0 Alpha is out as the newest feature milestone for this reference Wayland compositor that has seen quite an uptick in development activity this year.

Since the Weston 10.0 release back in February, Weston has seen a ton of new features, fixes, and lower-level improvements land for this reference Wayland compositor. In going through the lengthy change-log for Weston 11.0 Alpha, some of the highlights include:

- Many fixes and improvements to the DRM back-end.

- Weston's RDP back-end now allows specifying a listener file descriptor from the command-line. The RDP back-end also now has audio support, among many other improvements.

- Numerous OpenGL renderer improvements.

- Dropping systemd-logind support, removing the alternate launchers, and other changes.

- XWayland is now given its own session.

- XWayland with Weston finally supports minimizing of windows! Funny enough, this change was co-authored by several Microsoft engineers...

Microsoft engineers co-authored the XWayland window mimimization support for Weston. Microsoft's WSLg leverages Weston and hence why Microsoft has been making contributions in the Wayland space.

- The necessary changes around supporting heterogeneous heads and outputs.

- Many other bug fixes and improvements.

The full Weston 11.0 Alpha change-log can be found on Wayland-devel.

The plan is to have a Weston 11.0 Beta in about two weeks, the Weston 11.0 RC1 in early September, and to carry out the official Weston 11.0 stable release in mid-September.