Wayland News Archives

Wayland 1.20 is out today as the latest version of the reference Wayland library/support code and core protocol.

Wayland Protocols 1.24 is out today as the latest revision to this official collection of the Wayland protocols/specifications. Notable with the 1.24 revision is the introduction of wp_linux_dmabuf_feedback.

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.

Red Hat engineer Michel Dänzer has uncovered and addressed another performance shortcoming within X.Org's XWayland code.

It's been nine months since the release of Wayland 1.19 while now release plans have been drafted for Wayland 1.20.

The wlroots modular Wayland compositing library that was started by the Sway compositor now has an initial Vulkan renderer merged.

Project Wakefield is the recently established OpenJDK initiative to implement native Wayland support within Java.

The release candidate to XWayland 21.1.3 is out today with just a few changes but made significant by support for the NVIDIA 495 series driver GBM code path.

Another item is now crossed off the XWayland TODO list with OpenGL sRGB support wired up.

KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin X11/Wayland compositor code continues making progress on driving fundamental display improvements and ironing out the Wayland support.

Libinput 1.19 is now available as the newest version of this Linux input handling library commonly used these days by both X.Org and Wayland desktops.

Designed with VR headsets in mind, Wayland-Protocols 1.22 was released today and adds the DRM leasing protocol to its staging area.

The months-long effort for adding DRM lease support to Wayland via a new protocol has now been merged into Wayland Protocols as a new staging addition. The "drm_lease_v1" is principally motivated for improving the virtual reality head-mounted dispkay support under Wayland.

The SDL2 library that is commonly used by many cross-platform games landed several patches this weekend to improve its Wayland support.

XWayland 21.1.2 is out today and while it may seem like "just a point release", it's quite an exciting one at that since it does bring NVIDIA hardware acceleration for XWayland when paired with their new NVIDIA 470 series driver.

Simon Ser has released Sway 1.6.1 as the newest version of this popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

Joshua Ashton who is known for his work on DXVK (formerly D9VK) and related Steam Play / Proton graphics related efforts has submitted a proposal for a Wayland Surface-Suspension protocol.

Introduced last year was Taiwins as a compact Wayland compositor. While early on it began using Sway's WLROOTS library, it ended up writing its own Wayland compositor library (libtaiwins) and recently hit its version 0.3 milestone.

Released on Friday was a new version of Wayland-Protocols, the collection of protocol specifications for Wayland.

Sway 1.6 is official today as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

In the open-source world there can even be much fragmentation and multiple implementations around something as central as parsing of EDID blobs for monitor (display) information and that's only been made worse by the growing number of Wayland compositors.

Well known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has been working to make OBS Studio fully-working under Wayland and today that reality has been achieved with native Wayland support and the ability to capture monitors and windows on Wayland compositors.

For fans of Sway as the i3-inspired Wayland compositor the v1.6 update is coming soon while out today is the release candidate.

The LABWC Wayland compositor advertises itself as an Openbox alternative and just saw its inaugural release.

Back in December there was an experimental driver for native Wayland support within Wine published by Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis. A new version of the Wayland patches for Wine have now been published.

OBS Studio, the cross-platform open-source solution for live streaming and screen recording, has landed the last major piece of its effort to natively support Wayland.

Taiwins debuted last year as a compact Wayland compositor and focused on being modular with Wayland scripting support. Up to now Taiwins relied upon the WLROOTS effort born out of the Sway project for doing much of the Wayland heavy-lifting but the developer has now replaced it with its own Wayland support library.

Wayland 1.18 released back in February 2020 while now nearly one year later it's been succeeded by Wayland 1.19.

As expected, the Wayland 1.19 release dance has begun.

In recent years Red Hat engineers have been contributing to WebRTC in Chromium and related projects as part of Wayland screen sharing support that also works with the likes of PipeWire and XDG-Desktop-Portal. Looking forward to 2021, more WebRTC improvements in Chromium/Chrome are on the way.

Wayland 1.18 came back in February while until now there wasn't much talk about a "Wayland 1.19" since at this stage the core functionality of Wayland is quite mature and stable. But now work is underway on Wayland 1.19 with aims to likely ship it in January.

A Sony engineer confirmed at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe that the company has begun using the Flutter toolkit atop Wayland as their means of developing user-interfaces on embedded systems.

At this week's virtual Embedded Linux Conference was a talk on Monday by Igalia engineer Maksim Sisov as to the state of native Wayland support for the open-source Chromium web browser and in turn Google Chrome.

Following the news yesterday of NetBSD changing its default X11 window manager after two decades with TWM to now using CTWM by default, some wondered why they don't jump on the Wayland bandwagon.

WayVNC 0.3 released today as the Wayland VNC server built atop the WLROOTS library.

Back in May the Taiwins Wayland compositor was announced as a compact compositor based on Libweston while Thursday marked its second release.

Hikari, the FreeBSD-focused Wayland compositor that also works on Linux systems, is out with a new feature release.

Weston 9.0 is out as the latest feature update to this Wayland reference compositor.

Wayfire, a Wayland compositor inspired by the likes of Compiz with different desktop effects, is out today with a new feature release.

Libinput 1.16 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this input handling library used by the Linux desktop on both X11 and Wayland.

In addition to the Weston 9.0 Alpha compositor, this week also brought Wayland-Utils 1.0 as the inaugural release for this collection of Wayland utilities/tools.

Red Hat's input expert Peter Hutterer has started writing another library to help the Linux input ecosystem: LIBEI. This new library is focused on offering emulated input device support for Wayland in order to support use-cases like xdotool for automating input events.

Weston 9.0 release preparations are getting underway. At least compared to the original Weston 9.0 release plans, this Wayland compositor is running about a month behind those plans but in any case the release is now making its way to reality.

While there is already the Cage kiosk full-screen shell as well as the likes of Ubuntu's Mir Kiosk Shell, Wayland's Weston reference compositor now has its own implementation.

Joining Sway 1.5 for an exciting week in the Wayland space is an update to Cage, the Wayland compositor designed for kiosk-like experiences.

Sway 1.5 is out as a big feature update to this Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager. A big user-facing feature with Sway 1.5 is support for Adaptive Synchronization / Variable Refresh Rate, such as AMD FreeSync.

It's been over a half-year already for the current libinput 1.15 series for this input handling library used on both X.Org and Wayland environments. But libinput 1.16 is finally en route with the first release candidate out today.

Wayland's Weston compositor has provided a weston-info utility to display information on supported Wayland extensions and versioning along with other details of the Wayland compositor environment. That utility is now being spun out as wayland-info as a Wayland compositor-agnostic utility for displaying this information.

With Weston 8.0 having shipped in January, Wayland developers are beginning to prepare for the next feature release of this reference Wayland compositor.

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.5 Wayland compositor is now available for testing that continues to be inspired by the i3 design while being at the forefront of Wayland capabilities.