Standalone XWayland Makes It For Ubuntu 21.04 Along With Linux 5.11, Mesa 21.0

As part of planning for Ubuntu 21.04 to use Wayland by default when running on the default GNOME Shell desktop, Ubuntu developers were going to evaluate the standalone XWayland work being pursued by Red Hat initially for Fedora in order to ship newer XWayland code without resorting to releasing a new X.Org Server. That standalone XWayland package is now on its way to the Ubuntu archive.

Yesterday marked the release of XWayland 21.1 as the first standalone XWayland release. Over what's found in the current stable xorg-server, XWayland 21.1 brings improvements for GLAMOR, X-Video, RENDER format support, using the EGL implementation for the GLX provider, Wayland Viewport protocol support, improved relative mouse input and keyboard grabs, and other changes.

On Wednesday the "xwayland" package was uploaded to Ubuntu and for the moment found in the Hirsute-Proposed archive for Ubuntu 21.04. Ubuntu X/graphics wrangler Timo Aaltonen oversaw the landing of the XWayland package in Ubuntu. For the moment though it's not the stable 21.1.0 release but rather a release candidate though that should be updated in time. It's good to see this initial import make it for the Ubuntu 21.04 cycle in order to be able to provide a better XWayland experience for Ubuntu gamers especially if they do manage to stick to providing Wayland-by-default for non-NVIDIA Ubuntu 21.04 GNOME users.

Also significant yesterday was Mesa 21.0 landing for Ubuntu 21.04. After Mesa 21.0's release was delayed by about one month, it's good to see Mesa 21.0 managing to make it for this next Ubuntu Linux release to provide the freshest open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. There are many driver improvements with Mesa 21.0 especially for Intel and Radeon users.

Lastly, as expected, Linux 5.11 will be powering Ubuntu 21.04 as the default kernel. There are many new features of Linux 5.11 and this will be the latest stable kernel series in time for the release of Ubuntu 21.04 with Linux 5.12 not releasing until the end of April or so.

Ubuntu 21.04 is aiming for release on 22 April while coming up at the start of April is the beta release, the kernel freeze on 8 April, and the final freeze on 15 April.