Wayland 1.19 Released With Small Protocol Updates, Fixes

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

Even with one year passing, Wayland 1.19 is a very minor update over Wayland 1.18. That's part of the reason why they moved off timed releases in the first place was the core Wayland code and protocol being quite stable at this point: there is very little change. Most of the work remaining to get Wayland ready for production use across all workloads is on the compositor side with KDE Plasma's KWin seeing improvements, GNOME Shell + Mutter being in very good shape, etc. There is also the driver obstacle of the NVIDIA proprietary driver support at the moment not being ideal but improvements are pending there. That is all outside of the core Wayland code itself that is the protocol and key libraries.

For Wayland 1.19 there is just a few dozen patches, most of them minor fixes or Meson build system / tests updates. There are a few documentation improvements and clarifications but nothing too pressing.

Those curious can see the recent commits to the Wayland Git repository via FreeDesktop.org. Nothing major with this release nor has there been any talk of any big fundamental changes coming up soon to core Wayland with the main task now being to get all of the key compositors into good shape and playing well with all major GPU drivers.