Wayland News Archives

Years ago long before GNOME had great Wayland support and was used by default on the likes of Fedora Workstation and long before other Wayland compositors had mature support along with other areas of the stack, there was a Linux distribution offering up an experimental Linux "Live DVD/USB" OS for showcasing Wayland. That distribution is now out with a new release.

For those wanting to learn more about the inner-workings of Wayland and its architecture, The Wayland Book is now freely available for all to learn from for moving past the X11 world on the Linux desktop.

Mir 1.8 is available today as the newest feature update to this display stack developed by Canonical that currently is focused on providing a pleasant Wayland compositor experience especially for kiosk-type environments and others wanting to transition from X11 to Wayland.

The i3-inspired Sway Wayland compositor is seeing work carried out for it to support Adaptive-Sync / Variable Rate Refresh.

Coming a month after Weston 8.0 and a few weeks after Wayland 1.18 is Wayland-Protocols 1.19 (and subsequently Wayland-Protocols 1.20 over a snafu) as the collection of Wayland protocol specifications.

If you have been looking for a simple dock/launcher that natively supports Wayland, LavaLauncher 1.6 is available as one such solution.

Wayland 1.18 is out today as the first update to the core Wayland code in nearly one year.

The X11 client support for Mir that leverages XWayland is graduating from its "experimental" status.

Weston 8.0 was released today as the newest version of this reference Wayland compositor.

Sway 1.4 is out today as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor that has a growing following.

In meeting the plans for releasing Wayland 1.18 in February, the alpha release of this Wayland update is now available.

Without seeing a new release of Wayland itself in nearly one year, a plan has been rolled out for having Wayland 1.18 in mid-February.

While Wayland's Weston reference compositor has been using the Meson build system for about the past year, only this week did Wayland itself see Meson support introduced.

Drew DeVault released Sway 1.3 RC1 on New Year's Eve as the latest test release for this increasingly popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor built off his WLROOTS library.

The 2010s saw the release of Wayland 1.0, Ubuntu's Mir initially being a "competitor" to now embracing Wayland, desktop environments like GNOME and KDE now having good support for it as an alternative to X11, and other functionality continues to be added to Wayland compositors and its standard protocols.

Following the Weston 8.0 Alpha release from earlier this month, the Weston 8.0 Beta is now available for this reference Wayland compositor.

One of many features not yet in place for Purism's Librem 5 smartphone is working convergence where one can plug-in a display and keyboard/mouse to the phone and have a working system, along the lines of what was originally envisioned by Canonical with Ubuntu Touch. But some progress is being made with at least getting their phone-focused "Phosh" Wayland compositor working on the desktop form factor.

Weston release manager Simon Ser on Friday released the Wayland's Weston 8.0 reference compositor in alpha form.

For years there has been work on a Wayland back-end to Ozone, the Google component for abstracting user-interface elements and input/window handling among other tasks across platforms. It looks like in 2020 the Ozone Wayland support will be in good standing and promoted out of beta.

Simon Ser has stepped up again to manage the upcoming release of the Weston 8.0 Wayland reference compositor. No Wayland update itself is planned with nothing real to release at this point, but Weston 8.0 should arrive before the end of January.

Over the years there have been many interesting Wayland projects to take flight focused on new and interesting use-cases. One of these interesting (and experimental) Wayland compositors was NEMO-UX focused on providing a shell for computing environments that span large surfaces like virtual chalkboards or tabletops.

Drew DeVault of Sway/WL-ROOTS notoriety and longtime Wayland developer Simon Ser have started development on WXRC, a new Wayland compositor.

While KDE's new goals will include focusing on Wayland support, a big TODO item was just crossed off the list this week... KDE Plasma finally supports fractional scaling under Wayland.

Waypipe is off to the races as the newest network transparency effort in the Wayland space. Waypipe provides a network transparent Wayland proxy for running native Wayland programs/games over a network similar to X11's capabilities and forwarding X over an SSH connection.

Drew DeVault released Sway 1.2 overnight as the newest feature update for this popular Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager.

Wayland's Weston 7.0 was released on Friday with the newest features for this reference compositor implementation.

Sway and WLROOTS creator Drew DeVault on top of his several open-source projects has also been working on improving the VR infrastructure support on Wayland as part of contract work for Status.im. The secure communication company is looking to build a Wayland-driven VR workspace but for that the VR headset support on Wayland needs to be improved.

WEV is a new Wayland utility developed by Drew DeVault of Wayland notoriety for his work on the Sway i3-inspired compositor and the WLROOTS library.

Drew DeVault is working on buttoning up the Sway 1.2 Wayland compositor release as the newest feature update to this i3 window manager inspired compositor.

One of the long-time work-in-progress patch series has been realized in time for next month's GNOME 3.34 release... Mutter when acting as a Wayland compositor will allow starting XWayland on-demand, or rather only running it when needed to handle an X11 client/application.

Wayland release manager Simon Ser announced the alpha release of the Weston 7.0 reference compositor on Friday that also marks the feature freeze for this Wayland compositor update.

Wayland's Weston compositor for the past year has provided a remoting plug-in for virtual output streaming that was built atop RTP/GStreamer. Now though a new plug-in has landed in the Weston code-base making use of Red Hat's promising PipeWire project.

Simon Ser who has been serving as the Wayland/Weston release manager has laid out a schedule for getting out the next major release of Wayland's reference compositor.

An Intel open-source developer contributed support to Wayland's reference Weston compositor for enabling HDCP support on a per-output basis using a new allow_hdcp option.

Waypipe is a transparent Wayland proxy and the latest of several different projects aiming to make it easy running Wayland clients over a network similar to X11's capabilities.

The Mir 1.2 release was aiming to make it easier to develop Mir servers with custom Wayland extensions easier, but in dog feeding the work, Canonical's long-time Mir developer Alan Griffiths realized some shortcomings in the experience.

Thanks to longtime open-source Linux graphics developer Daniel Stone, Wayland's Weston reference compositor now has support for the EGL_KHR_partial_update extension to provide for potentially better performance.

Weston 6.0 was released back in March with a remote/streaming plug-in and Meson becoming the preferred build system among other improvements. Weston 6.0.1 was released today by Simon Ser with various fixes to this reference Wayland compositor.

The ever important Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) can now handle HiDPI window scaling under Wayland.

While waiting on a flight delay yesterday, I was trawling through GitHub checking out different open-source projects, in this case Vulkan projects, and pleased to see that Chamferwm still exists. For those that missed our earlier coverage of Chamferwm months ago, it's a Vulkan-powered X11 compositor / window manager.

Three months after the release of Sway 1.0, Sway 1.1 is now available as the next feature update for this i3-inspired and increasingly popular Wayland compositor.

Last week we wrote about a "Wayland Itches" program being devised by prolific open-source contributor Hans de Goede of Red Hat. The goal of this program is to address itches/paper-cuts/problems in using GNOME Shell atop Wayland. He's received a fair amount of feedback so far and has some early indications to share.

Longtime Red Hat developer Hans de Goede who has been responsible for many Linux desktop improvements over the years from laptop support fixes to open-source GPU driver fixes to most recently flicker-free boot has a new area of hacking: taking care of the pain points under Wayland.

Sway 1.0 was released nearly two months ago as the i3-inspired Wayland compositor while now on approach is Sway 1.1 as the newest feature release.

Wio is the newest Wayland compositor out there and re-implements Rio, the windowing system used by Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system.

The Cage Wayland Compositor for kiosk / full-screen-one-app environments has managed to materialize.

The latest Wayland protocol in the works is a color manager calibration protocol.

Derek Foreman, formerly of Samsung Research (Open-Source Group), who had been serving as the release manager of Wayland and the Weston compositor for the past number of release cycles is stepping down from his role.

The high resolution scrolling support in Linux 5.0 has been a headache to say the least. After being ejected from Linux 4.20 following early fall-out, the support was merged for Linux 5.0 but the user-space support has yet to stabilize.

SPURV is a new open-source initiative out of Collabora for "running Android next to Wayland" with the Android app windows being rendered alongside Wayland Linux applications and having full 3D acceleration support.