Sway 1.10 Released With GPU Reset Recovery & Other Wayland Enhancements

Sway 1.10 released on Sunday as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor for the Linux desktop.

Ongoing maintainer Simon Ser released Sway 1.10 on Sunday as the newest feature release to this popular Wayland compositor. The Sway 1.10 series is built atop the wlroots 0.18 library that in turn delivers many new Wayland features for compositors. Wlroots 0.18 brings new protocol support like linux-drm-syncobj-v1 for explicit synchronization, alpha-modifier-v1 for alpha channel support on surfaces, ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1 as a protocol for taskbars and app switchers, and ext-transient-seat-v1 for better handling VNC/remote use-cases. Wlroots 0.18 also has improvements for its Vulkan rendering support, a new stateless render API for reading back pixel buffers from the GPU, and a variety of other changes.

Sway 1.10 does introduce GPU reset recovery handling for better robustness of the compositor. There is also a new command to use an ICC profile for an output. The output confirmation algorithm has also been enhanced. Sway 1.10 also features a rewrite of its renderer to make use of the wlroots scene graph API for better performance.

New Wayland protocols supported by Sway 1.10 include tearing-control-v1 for opt-in tearing page-flips, ext-transient-seat-v1 for remoting apps, ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1 for top-level information querying, and xdg-shell v5. There is also support for IME popups used for CJK along with various other changes.

Downloads and more details on the Sway 1.10 Wayland compositor release via GitHub.