Sway 1.5-RC1 Wayland Compositor Brings VRR / Adaptive-Sync, New Protocol Support

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.

With Sway 1.5-RC1 there are more than 250 changes and some of the highlights include:

- Adaptive synchronization / VRR (FreeSync) support is in place to help reduce stuttering for gamers.

- Support for dynamically creating headless outputs via a create_output command. These headless outputs can be used in conjunction with WayVNC for VNC desktop capabilities.

- Support for the Viewporter protocol to better support legacy X11 games and with better performance. The Viewporter protocol allows for cropping and scaling of surface contents and disconnecting the relationship between the buffer and surface size.

- Support for the wlr-foreign-toplevel-management protocol that can be used for creating custom docks and window switchers. This protocol exposes a list of opened applications and actions can then be performed on them such as maximizing windows or switching between these windows.

- Virtualization and remote desktop software can now inhibit keyboard shortcuts.

- IME input method editors are now supported.

More details on all of the Sway 1.5-RC1 changes and download links via GitHub.