Wayland News Archives

Wayland has gained support for client and server-side programming language bindings.

In the past few days several videos have surfaced for "Nemoshell", a reported window manager for Wayland but details on the software project are scarce.

In addition to the Hawaii Weston Shell update and better touch input support on Weston, there's some more good news for Wayland: the GNOME Display Settings is now working on Wayland via a new Dbus interface.

At the beginning of the day I wrote about the Hawaii desktop environment having a new Weston Shell release. This Qt5-based desktop is not only nice for showing off the next-generation Linux display stack, but with it also comes a dramatic reduction in system memory usage.

Hawaii Shell, a Qt 5 based desktop interface that has a Weston plug-in for Wayland support, has experienced a new release. This Hawaii Shell release for Wayland has many new desktop-related features for those wishing for something a little more than a stock Weston desktop.

Commits today to Wayland's Weston compositor improve the touch event situation.

Orbital is a plugin/client for Wayland's Weston compositor that provides a custom shell for the next-generation display server. Orbital is made using Qt 5 and Qt Quick 2.

Patches were published today that add support to Wayland's Weston compositor for Sony Clickpad touchpads.

Aside from the progressing PRIME support for Wayland, more good news today for this X.Org Foundation backed project is RealVNC expressing interest in supporting Wayland for their remote desktop software.

PRIME, the DRI2 offloading implementation, is beginning to be brought up under Wayland.

A simple drawing library has been created for Wayland in the process of porting a simple terminal and dynamic menu system from X11 to Wayland.

With the recent release of Wayland/Weston 1.2, here's a look at some current development statistics.

Carsten Haitzler, a.k.a. "Rasterman" and known for his work on the Enlightenment window manager / desktop, has provided some new comments on Enlightenment's planned support for Wayland.

A lot of Linux desktop users are looking forward to the full port of the Enlightenment desktop to Wayland.

Sam Spilsbury, the Compiz developer and former Canonical employee, has made progress in being able to run the XBMC media application directly on Wayland.

The Wayland LiveCD has been updated against the new Wayland/Weston 1.2 release. This Linux LiveCD also ships with the Wayland-enabled GTK3, Qt5, SDL, and Enlightenment EFL tool-kits for easily trying out this next-generation Linux display stack.

After about three months of development, Wayland 1.2.0 along with the matching version of its Weston reference compositor have been released. The updated Wayland/Weston stack bring many new features to the table.

Kristian Høgsberg has announced the first release candidates for the upcoming Wayland 1.2 release along with the Weston 1.2 reference compositor.

The widely talked about fork of Wayland and Weston no longer seem to be advancing.

In the past few days I delivered X.Org vs. XMir Ubuntu Unity benchmarks on Intel hardware and Nouveau / NVIDIA. The benchmarking also found that 2D was also slower with XMir than simply running an X.Org Server. Benchmarks now carried out of X.Org vs. XWayland show that the Wayland-based equivalent is generally faster, at least for 2D operations.

Soon it will likely be possible to run a KDE desktop over Wayland using Gentoo Linux with its Portage packages.

While many are super excited about Wayland and the thought of X11 finally going away in the coming years, some who have been enthusiastic about Wayland/Weston are starting to lose interest. Here's the reasons by one Wayland enthusiast for losing motivation in the project.

As the first point release since the exciting release of Wayland/Weston 1.1, important bug-fixes have landed for the display protocol's reference compositor.

Wayland's Weston system compositor has been hooked up to systemd so it can be used for client notification support.

With new patches, multi-seat support for Wayland with the Weston compositor is beginning to work well. For showing off Wayland/Weston multi-seat handling, a video has been made.

Last week I wrote about the emergence of a new Wayland Weston compositor renderer for the Raspberry Pi. There was a fair amount of discussion about it and since then additional details have emerged.

For technology demos and testing, the "first true Wayland LiveCD" has been released that can start Wayland directly without depending upon an X.Org environment.

Besides a new Raspberry Pi renderer for Weston, another interesting set of Wayland patches today is for providing output scaling support with Weston when using the X11 and DRM back-ends.

After working on the Raspberry Pi support for Wayland/Weston, Pekka Paalanen has announced a new "rpi-renderer" for the low-cost ARM development board.

Support for sub-surfaces has been merged into mainline Wayland after the protocol work and other changes for this exciting new feature has been in development for several months. Sub-surfaces by itself isn't too exciting to end-users but will benefit application developers in enhancing the Wayland-powered Linux desktop.

Support for color management has been merged into Wayland's Weston compositor.

An extensive list of plans for the Wayland/Weston 1.2 release were shared by the project's founder, Kristian Høgsberg.

The lightweight GTK-based WebKit-powered Midori web-browser should now be running natively on Wayland.

The latest back-end to be published for Wayland's Weston compositor is for Red Hat's SPICE.

Kristian Høgsberg has clarified the scope and goals of Weston, Wayland's reference compositor. Now that Weston has become somewhat of its own desktop environment, Kristian has clarified its intentions to benefit future patches.

Similar to Wayland, Mir now is using the xkbcommon library.

The first post-1.0 release of the Wayland Display Server protocol and the Weston reference compositor implementation has been released.

JavaScript bindings for the Wayland client have come in the form of a Node.js implementation.

Jolla, the start-up company built around former Nokia N9 engineers developing the Sailfish OS for mobile phones, might be dating Wayland. Jolla's Chief Research Engineer has made it possible to run Wayland atop Android GPU drivers. Additionally, it's being done with glibc rather than Android's Bionic libc derivative.

Version 1.1 of Wayland and the Weston reference compositor will soon be released. The first major post-1.0 updates to Wayland/Weston bring a number of exciting features to this next-generation Linux display server.

Support for the Intelligent Input Bus (IBus) within Wayland/Weston was proposed this weekend via a set of eighteen patches.

The Weston compositor to Wayland now has an early color management framework.

It's now becoming quite easy to understand why the developer of the Northfield/Norwood fork of Wayland was ejected from the Wayland development community and banned from development communication channels.

One month ago a FreeRDP-based remote compositor for Wayland's Weston was proposed. Now having undergone six code revisions, the Weston Remote Desktop Protocol back-end has been merged.

In an attempt to promote his Wayland fork and gain influence, the lead developer was offering monetary kickbacks to highlight his forked Wayland and Weston code-bases.

The state of the GTK+ tool-kit for the Wayland Display Server is now ready for day-to-day use.

Yesterday I reported on Wayland and Weston being forked as "GH-Next" as a new project that sought to drive new Linux desktop innovations. Now today, enter Northfield/Norwood.

Wayland and Weston along with other key branches like GTK+ and QtWayland have been forked by an independent developer under the "GH-Next" project name.

A new release of the VA-API library supports the Wayland 1.0 protocol.

Canonical's Christopher Halse Rogers has blogged some more about their views on the Mir Display Server and its design relative to X11/X.Org and Wayland.