Wayland News Archives

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.

Released today was the first alpha release of the upcoming Weston 12.0 release, which continues to serve as the reference compositor for Wayland.

Wayland 1.22 is now available as the newest feature update to this core set of Wayland protocol and helper code.

The Blender open-source 3D modeling software as well as the GTK toolkit are the latest open-source projects this week ironing out support for Wayland's fractional scaling protocol.

Coincidentally landing on GNOME 44 release day is also XWayland 23.1, the newest version of this portion of the X.Org Server code that allows legacy X11 client applications/games to run atop Wayland environments. With XWayland 23.1 comes a number of shiny new features to continue to enhance the X11 experience on Wayland.

Labwc 0.6.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this wlroots-based window-stacking Wayland compositor that is inspired by Openbox.

A NVIDIA engineer has opened up a merge request to improve the wlroots Wayland library so compositors based on it can enjoy better gaming performance for dual-GPU systems, namely around laptops sporting a discrete NVIDIA GPU but can help other GPU hardware/drivers too.

Planning and early preparations are underway to get out XWayland 23.1 as the next feature release by the end of March.

Back in November Wayland Protocols 1.31 released and was headlined by a new extension to handle fractional scaling. The latest Wayland compositor adding support for fractional scaling is now the popular i3-inspired Sway compositor as well as the wl-roots library used by it and other compositors.

The first tagged release of libdisplay-info (v0.1) is now available for this new library that aims to reduce code duplication and fragmentation among Wayland compositors and other software making use of monitor EDID and DisplayID parsing.

Labwc that has been in development for a few years as a window-stacking Wayland compositor issued its latest release this weekend.

For over a decade now RebeccaBlackOS "RBOS" has been around as a live Linux environment intended to showcase the latest Wayland code from various desktops/compositors to other Wayland-native software. RBOS pre-dates many of the major Linux distributions offering any Wayland support out-of-the-box.

Sway 1.8 is out this Christmas as the newest feature release to this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

With last week's release of Xfce 4.18 there was some disappointment expressed among readers over the lack of any major Wayland progress in this desktop release. While not part of Xfce 4.18, the work on adapting the Xfwm4 compositor / window manager code to using Wlroots for Wayland has continued progressing.

At the start of the year SDL attempted to prefer Wayland over X.Org/X11 thanks to the maturing Wayland support for this widely-used software/hardware abstraction layer by numerous cross-platform games. But that change was later reverted over ecosystem challenges around Wayland. Now as we approach the end of the year, SDL is again trying to prefer Wayland over X11.

Wayland Protocols 1.31 has been released and this collection of protocols is now headlined by the addition of fractional scaling support!

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.8 Wayland compositor is now available for testing.

After many months of work, the wp-fractional-scale-v1 protocol for Wayland is set to be merged imminently for fractional scaling support.

Red Hat engineer Jan Grulich has written a year-end summary about the ongoing work for supporting Wayland-based screen sharing for the Google Chrome/Chromium web browser. The code still isn't enabled by default but given the strides being made that could change "sooner than later" if all goes well.

In the early days of Wayland one of the main philosophical driving points for this alternative to the X.Org Server was that "every frame is perfect" and would forego screen tearing among other rendering impurities. Introduced now with Wayland Protocols 1.30 though is a new staging protocol to allow screen tearing.

The wlroots Wayland compositor support library that started out as a companion project to Sway is out with a shiny new feature release.

The latest daily development builds of the Blender 3D modelling software have enabled native support for Wayland. If all goes well, the Blender 3.4 release coming up will ship with this native Wayland support for Linux.

Wayland-Protocols 1.27 was released this morning by Jonas Ådahl in pushing out two new protocols under the staging umbrella.

One of the rather elusive items on the Linux desktop is High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support... There's been code in the works for years but across desktops and drivers, it's still a long-term effort getting HDR support on the Linux desktop. Even going back to 2016, with NVIDIA's cross-platform driver code the Linux desktop remained the bottleneck. There is at least some ongoing work to address this long-term issue with AMD this week presenting on the topic.

OpenJDK/Java has been making progress on implementing native "pure" Wayland toolkit integration not dependent upon X.Org/X11 or XWayland for rendering of Java GUI applications.

Weston, the reference compositor to Wayland, is out today with a big feature update. Most exciting is preparation work for better supporting HDR monitors moving forward as well as preparing for multi-GPU and multi-back-end use-cases.

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.

Developer "adlo" announced to Wayland developers today the work on porting Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager code to Wayland and this new "Xfway" compositor is being brought up using the wlroots library that is becoming increasingly common among the smaller Wayland compositors.

Disclosed on Tuesday were two new X.Org Server security vulnerabilities concerning possible local privilege escalation and remote code execution. X.Org Server 21.1.4 was released with these mitigations to the XKB extension while XWayland is also vulnerable and has now been patched with XWayland 22.1.3.

WayVNC 0.5 was released on Saturday as a feature update to this VNC server for Wayland compositors leveraging the WLROOTS library.

Wayland-Protocols 1.26 was released on Thursday as the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland. With Wayland-Protocols 1.26 is the new Single Pixel Buffer protocol and enhancements to existing protocols.

It's been over a half-year since the last Wayland update with the core code now largely mature, but out today is Wayland 1.21 with the new wl_pointer high-resolution scroll event as well as some smaller additions and fixes.

José Expósito continues with recently stepping up to manage libinput releases, the input handling library that for the modern Linux desktop is now widely used across both X.Org and Wayland environments. Libinput 1.21 debuted this weekend with various improvements over the prior release.

Two years after the merge request was originally opened, the upcoming Wayland 1.21 release is adding high resolution scroll wheel support for mice to match the work carried out for X.Org and within the Linux kernel drivers.

Merged yesterday to the mainline X.Org Server for XWayland is the "-force-xrandr-emulation" option added for Valve's Gamescope / Steam Deck usage.

Chris Lord at Igalia has recently been looking at the WebKit browser engine performance as it concerns embedded devices. From this work he found that WebKit with its WPE port for embedded devices was found to be performing rather poorly on Wayland. Patches are now pending to address two uncovered issues.

Back in January was the change pushed into SDL2 Git where the library prefers Wayland by default where available rather than defaulting to using X11 support. However, pushed today into SDL2 is a revert on that earlier change due to Wayland issues that the developers are more comfortable sticking to X11/XWayland by default until various Wayland problems are addressed.

A new Wayland protocol has been proposed for dealing with fractional scaling of surfaces that paired with wp_viewport can be used for achieving fractional scaling.

There has been a known problem for some time that with the increasing number of different Wayland compositors out there, there is a lot of fragmentation when it comes to display EDID/DisplayID handling. Thankfully libdisplay-info has been started with hopes of addressing that issue.

XWayland 22.1 is out today as the newest standalone feature release for this XWayland code issued separately from the X.Org Server. XWayland continues in very robust shape for allowing X11 clients whether it be games or applications to run atop capable Wayland compositors.

Weston 10.0 has been released as the newest feature update to Wayland's reference compositor that often works as a proving grounds and compositor showcasing shiny new features for Wayland.

Wayland Protocols 1.25 was released today as the collection of testing and stable Wayland protocols. New to Wayland Protocols 1.25 is the session-lock-v1 protocol being experimental and responsible to handle session locking.

After working its way through the release candidate process, Sway 1.7 is out this weekend as the newest feature release for this i3-inspired, lightweight Wayland compositor.

Sway 1.7 is up to its second release candidate for this popular i3-inspired Wayland lightweight compositor.

Early in 2021 there was the inaugural release of LABWC as a stacking Wayland compositor that promoted itself as an alternative to Openbox. In kicking off the new year, LABWC 0.4 is now available.

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.7 Wayland compositor is now available for testing.

For the Valve-funded Xrdesktop has allowed GNOME and KDE desktops to be VR-aware, Collabora has been developing WXRD as a standalone Wayland compositor for XR/VR use-cases.

The first alpha release of Weston 10.0 is now available as the next feature update to Wayland's reference compositor.