Wayland News Archives

Announced back in February was Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built atop Mir and developed by Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek. Today he announced version 0.2 as the latest feature update to this Wayland compositor with tiling window management.

Wayland Protocols 1.35 is out today as the newest update to this collection of Wayland protocol specifications.

As expected, the first release candidate of the forthcoming XWayland 24.1 is now available ahead of its planned stable debut in May.

The XWayland 23.2 series was introduced last August while now release preparations have begun for releasing XWayland 24.1 as the next feature release for this X.Org Server derived code for allowing X11 clients (apps / games) to work within the confines of Wayland environments.

Wayland 1.22 released at the start of April 2023 while now Wayland 1.23 is taking shape as the next version of this core Wayland code.

Since last year Red Hat engineers have been developing xwayland-run and wlheadless-run for spawning X11 clients within its own dedicated XWayland rootful instance and for running a Wayland client on a set of supported Wayland headless compositors, respectively. The intent is on improving the Wayland headless experience as well as being able to get classic X11 sessions up and running via rootful XWayland. Out today is the XWayland-Run v0.0.3 release.

Wayland Protocols 1.34 was released on Wednesday with three new staging protocols for further enhancing Wayland's capabilities.

Running XWayland in rootful mode now allows for working HiDPI and fractional scaling support.

XWayland had targeted both the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) and EGLStream APIs due to NVIDIA not supporting GBM like all of the other Linux drivers. But now that the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver has been boasting GBM support and advancing with their Wayland platform support in general, XWayland is letting go of the EGLStream mess.

The Hyprland customizable Wayland compositor with dynamic tiling is celebrating its two year milestone by issuing v0.37 (and a v0.37.1 paper bag release).

Niri is an interesting scrollable tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM that has been gaining user interest in recent months. This weekend marked the v0.1.3 release of this Wayland compositor.

UWSM is short for the Universal Wayland Session Manager and it incorporates systemd's help in managing the Wayland compositors.

WayVNC 0.8 was released this weekend as the VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC attaches to wlroots-using compositors and creators virtual input devices and exposes the display via the RFB protocol for the lack of Wayland having any standardized VNC-type support for remote/network computing.

Sway 1.9 has been released as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor built atop the closely-aligned wlroots Wayland compositor library.

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek announced the first-ever release of Miracle-WM as a Wayland compositor built on top of Mir.

While there are a lot of Wayland compositors out there that aren't too different from each other in terms of features, one of the more unique ones is Greenfield. The Greenfield Wayland compositor has been out there for a few years now as an in-browser HTML5-based solution that is continuing to prove itself capable and even fast enough for handling Linux gaming.

In case you missed it debuting last week was Niri v0.1 as a new, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the GNOME extension PaperWM. Out today is a follow-on release with more fixes and a few additional features for this new Wayland compositor.

The newest feature tacked onto the Godot 4.3 open-source game engine is featuring native support for Wayland on Linux.

Merged today to Wayland-Protocols is xdg-toplevel-drag, the protocol that's been under discussion for the past nine months for handling applications that request a window is moved at the same time as a drag operation.

The newest Wayland compositor on the scene with its first stable release is Niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the PaperWM GNOME Shell extesnsion.

Simon Ser just released Sway 1.9-rc1 as the newest test release for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

Wayland Protocols 1.33 was released today by Daniel Stone for this de facto collection of Wayland protocols for implementing by the various Wayland compositors.

As part of the Red Hat led effort for making XWayland's rootful mode more useful and the ability to run X11 desktop sessions within XWayland as part of RHEL 10 dropping the X.Org Server support besides XWayland, a new "-output" option was added to XWayland for better control over placement of rootful fullscreen windows.

One of the limitations of Google Chrome's Wayland support has been the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) not being supported for GPU-based video acceleration as it's directly targeted the libva-x11 library. But with code merged on Friday to Chromium, libva-drm is now used to allow for working VA-API acceleration on X11 or Wayland.

The Wayland ecosystem had a phenomenal year from much better NVIDIA proprietary driver support, Firefox ending out the year shipping with Wayland support enabled by default, KDE Plasma 6.0 will default to Wayland following many improvements on the KDE side, the Wine Wayland driver upstreamed in its initial form, XWayland continuing to be enhanced, and a lot of other software from desktop environments to apps continuing to embrace Wayland.

Lab Wayland Compositor (labwc) is out with a new version ahead of Christmas for this wlroots-based window-stacking compositor that is inspired by the Openbox window manager.

With this week's release of Firefox 121, Wayland is being used by default when encountering a native Wayland desktop. Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer.

WayVNC v0.8 is working its way toward release as a VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC continues to make it quite easy to have VNC support for Wayland desktops employing wlroots and this next release brings even more features.

Miriway is an effort for bringing Wayland to desktops not currently having native Wayland support and is made possible via the Canonical-developed Mir. Miriway has been a side-project of Alan Griffiths as the lead Mir developer and today he published a blog post with more details for users interested in making use of it.

As part of Red Hat's plans to avoid shipping the X.Org Server in RHEL10, Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat's graphics team announced their work on a new xwayland-run helper utility along with wlheadless-run and xwfb-run utilities.

Weston 13.0 has been released as the latest major update to this reference Wayland compositor that attracts various experimental features and other innovations as developers experiment in the post-X11 world.

Released on Tuesday was a new version of wlroots, the Wayland compositor support library that was born out of the i3-inspired Sway compositor project. With this new release are new Wayland protocols, continued work on their Vulkan renderer, and the ability for the Wayland back-end to embed a wlroots compositor inside an existing Wayland client.

While the KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell desktops are running on Wayland well, there are still many smaller desktops that haven't yet been ported over to Wayland or still in the early stages. There's also no shortage of passionate open-source developers toying around with their own desktops / compositors. Louvre is now the latest library out there like WLROOTS and libweston aiming to help develop Wayland compositors.

Following the recent talk of XWayland's rootful mode becoming more useful, Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan has continued enhancing the XWayland rootful support. Last week he opened up the merge request for adding HiDPI support to this mode.

Most Linux desktop users/gamers/enthusiasts are relying on XWayland for X11 client compatibility atop Wayland compositors in the "rootless" mode. With the XWayland rootless mode, X11 applications and games can integrate nicely within a Wayland desktop environment with just the individual client window presented. However, for those interested, the XWayland "rootful" mode has become more capable this year for those wanting to render an entire X11 environment within the Wayland compositor as a window.

Weston 13.0 Alpha was released today as the next iteration of this reference Wayland compositor.

Plans have been drafted to release the Weston 13.0 reference compositor for Wayland next month.

WayVNC 0.7 was released today as the newest feature update to this VNC server for use with wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC will dynamically attach to running Wayland sessions and allow for convenient VNC server support.

The wlroots Wayland compositor library used by Sway and other Wayland compositors to help with the heavy lifting has merged support for the tearing control protocol.

The Wayland Color Management protocol has been years in the making and is needed for a client to specify the color space and HDR metadata of a surface. This color management protocol is ultimately needed for getting high dynamic range (HDR) support working out well within Wayland environments. This week an initial merge request was opened for implementing the draft color management protocol with the Weston reference compositor.

Xfce 4.18 released last December with some strides on the Wayland front for this lightweight GTK-based desktop environment, but more work remains before Xfce will be fully compatible with Wayland and its own robust compositor. The Xfce Wayland road-map was recently updated to reflect the latest work on this major undertaking.

For those making use of the IntelliJ integrated development environment (IDE), JetBrains has been working to enable native Wayland support.

The Flatpak open-source app sandboxing tech has merged support for the Wayland security context protocol.

Libinput 1.24 is available today for this input handling library used by Linux systems both legacy X11/X.Org desktops and especially by modern Wayland compositors for unifying input handling in the open-source world.

XWayland 23.2 is out as stable today for this X.Org Server code for enjoying X11 window/client support within Wayland compositors. Several new features are implemented for this XWayland 23.2 milestone.

Jonas Ådahl of Red Hat today published a new version of the Wayland-Protocols package that consists of all the stable and staging protocol definitions for use in the Wayland world.

The libei 1.0 project milestone has now been achieved for this open-source effort started by Red Hat's Peter Hutterer for better emulated input support on Wayland.

Weston 12.0 as Wayland's reference compositor is now available with multiple GPU support in the DRM back-end, support for HDMI content types, support for the Wayland tearing control protocol, plane alpha DRM property handling, a PipeWire back-end, and much more.

Libei has been the multi-year effort by Red Hat's leading input expert Peter Hutterer on emulated input handling for Wayland. Libei consists of a client side library and EIS as the "Emulated Input Server" for this Wayland-focused emulated input device solution. Libei 1.0 is about to finally be released.

Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin issued a lengthy post encouraging users of this Apple Silicon focused Linux distribution to stop using X.Org as Wayland is the future.