Wayland News Archives

The Wayland ecosystem had a phenomenal year from much better NVIDIA proprietary driver support, Firefox ending out the year shipping with Wayland support enabled by default, KDE Plasma 6.0 will default to Wayland following many improvements on the KDE side, the Wine Wayland driver upstreamed in its initial form, XWayland continuing to be enhanced, and a lot of other software from desktop environments to apps continuing to embrace Wayland.

Lab Wayland Compositor (labwc) is out with a new version ahead of Christmas for this wlroots-based window-stacking compositor that is inspired by the Openbox window manager.

With this week's release of Firefox 121, Wayland is being used by default when encountering a native Wayland desktop. Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer.

WayVNC v0.8 is working its way toward release as a VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC continues to make it quite easy to have VNC support for Wayland desktops employing wlroots and this next release brings even more features.

Miriway is an effort for bringing Wayland to desktops not currently having native Wayland support and is made possible via the Canonical-developed Mir. Miriway has been a side-project of Alan Griffiths as the lead Mir developer and today he published a blog post with more details for users interested in making use of it.

As part of Red Hat's plans to avoid shipping the X.Org Server in RHEL10, Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat's graphics team announced their work on a new xwayland-run helper utility along with wlheadless-run and xwfb-run utilities.

Weston 13.0 has been released as the latest major update to this reference Wayland compositor that attracts various experimental features and other innovations as developers experiment in the post-X11 world.

Released on Tuesday was a new version of wlroots, the Wayland compositor support library that was born out of the i3-inspired Sway compositor project. With this new release are new Wayland protocols, continued work on their Vulkan renderer, and the ability for the Wayland back-end to embed a wlroots compositor inside an existing Wayland client.

While the KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell desktops are running on Wayland well, there are still many smaller desktops that haven't yet been ported over to Wayland or still in the early stages. There's also no shortage of passionate open-source developers toying around with their own desktops / compositors. Louvre is now the latest library out there like WLROOTS and libweston aiming to help develop Wayland compositors.

Following the recent talk of XWayland's rootful mode becoming more useful, Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan has continued enhancing the XWayland rootful support. Last week he opened up the merge request for adding HiDPI support to this mode.

Most Linux desktop users/gamers/enthusiasts are relying on XWayland for X11 client compatibility atop Wayland compositors in the "rootless" mode. With the XWayland rootless mode, X11 applications and games can integrate nicely within a Wayland desktop environment with just the individual client window presented. However, for those interested, the XWayland "rootful" mode has become more capable this year for those wanting to render an entire X11 environment within the Wayland compositor as a window.

Weston 13.0 Alpha was released today as the next iteration of this reference Wayland compositor.

Plans have been drafted to release the Weston 13.0 reference compositor for Wayland next month.

WayVNC 0.7 was released today as the newest feature update to this VNC server for use with wlroots-based Wayland compositors like Sway. WayVNC will dynamically attach to running Wayland sessions and allow for convenient VNC server support.

The wlroots Wayland compositor library used by Sway and other Wayland compositors to help with the heavy lifting has merged support for the tearing control protocol.

The Wayland Color Management protocol has been years in the making and is needed for a client to specify the color space and HDR metadata of a surface. This color management protocol is ultimately needed for getting high dynamic range (HDR) support working out well within Wayland environments. This week an initial merge request was opened for implementing the draft color management protocol with the Weston reference compositor.

Xfce 4.18 released last December with some strides on the Wayland front for this lightweight GTK-based desktop environment, but more work remains before Xfce will be fully compatible with Wayland and its own robust compositor. The Xfce Wayland road-map was recently updated to reflect the latest work on this major undertaking.

For those making use of the IntelliJ integrated development environment (IDE), JetBrains has been working to enable native Wayland support.

The Flatpak open-source app sandboxing tech has merged support for the Wayland security context protocol.

Libinput 1.24 is available today for this input handling library used by Linux systems both legacy X11/X.Org desktops and especially by modern Wayland compositors for unifying input handling in the open-source world.

XWayland 23.2 is out as stable today for this X.Org Server code for enjoying X11 window/client support within Wayland compositors. Several new features are implemented for this XWayland 23.2 milestone.

Jonas Ådahl of Red Hat today published a new version of the Wayland-Protocols package that consists of all the stable and staging protocol definitions for use in the Wayland world.

The libei 1.0 project milestone has now been achieved for this open-source effort started by Red Hat's Peter Hutterer for better emulated input support on Wayland.

Weston 12.0 as Wayland's reference compositor is now available with multiple GPU support in the DRM back-end, support for HDMI content types, support for the Wayland tearing control protocol, plane alpha DRM property handling, a PipeWire back-end, and much more.

Libei has been the multi-year effort by Red Hat's leading input expert Peter Hutterer on emulated input handling for Wayland. Libei consists of a client side library and EIS as the "Emulated Input Server" for this Wayland-focused emulated input device solution. Libei 1.0 is about to finally be released.

Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin issued a lengthy post encouraging users of this Apple Silicon focused Linux distribution to stop using X.Org as Wayland is the future.

Released today was the first alpha release of the upcoming Weston 12.0 release, which continues to serve as the reference compositor for Wayland.

Wayland 1.22 is now available as the newest feature update to this core set of Wayland protocol and helper code.

The Blender open-source 3D modeling software as well as the GTK toolkit are the latest open-source projects this week ironing out support for Wayland's fractional scaling protocol.

Coincidentally landing on GNOME 44 release day is also XWayland 23.1, the newest version of this portion of the X.Org Server code that allows legacy X11 client applications/games to run atop Wayland environments. With XWayland 23.1 comes a number of shiny new features to continue to enhance the X11 experience on Wayland.

Labwc 0.6.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this wlroots-based window-stacking Wayland compositor that is inspired by Openbox.

A NVIDIA engineer has opened up a merge request to improve the wlroots Wayland library so compositors based on it can enjoy better gaming performance for dual-GPU systems, namely around laptops sporting a discrete NVIDIA GPU but can help other GPU hardware/drivers too.

Planning and early preparations are underway to get out XWayland 23.1 as the next feature release by the end of March.

Back in November Wayland Protocols 1.31 released and was headlined by a new extension to handle fractional scaling. The latest Wayland compositor adding support for fractional scaling is now the popular i3-inspired Sway compositor as well as the wl-roots library used by it and other compositors.

The first tagged release of libdisplay-info (v0.1) is now available for this new library that aims to reduce code duplication and fragmentation among Wayland compositors and other software making use of monitor EDID and DisplayID parsing.

Labwc that has been in development for a few years as a window-stacking Wayland compositor issued its latest release this weekend.

For over a decade now RebeccaBlackOS "RBOS" has been around as a live Linux environment intended to showcase the latest Wayland code from various desktops/compositors to other Wayland-native software. RBOS pre-dates many of the major Linux distributions offering any Wayland support out-of-the-box.

Sway 1.8 is out this Christmas as the newest feature release to this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

With last week's release of Xfce 4.18 there was some disappointment expressed among readers over the lack of any major Wayland progress in this desktop release. While not part of Xfce 4.18, the work on adapting the Xfwm4 compositor / window manager code to using Wlroots for Wayland has continued progressing.

At the start of the year SDL attempted to prefer Wayland over X.Org/X11 thanks to the maturing Wayland support for this widely-used software/hardware abstraction layer by numerous cross-platform games. But that change was later reverted over ecosystem challenges around Wayland. Now as we approach the end of the year, SDL is again trying to prefer Wayland over X11.

Wayland Protocols 1.31 has been released and this collection of protocols is now headlined by the addition of fractional scaling support!

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.8 Wayland compositor is now available for testing.

After many months of work, the wp-fractional-scale-v1 protocol for Wayland is set to be merged imminently for fractional scaling support.

Red Hat engineer Jan Grulich has written a year-end summary about the ongoing work for supporting Wayland-based screen sharing for the Google Chrome/Chromium web browser. The code still isn't enabled by default but given the strides being made that could change "sooner than later" if all goes well.

In the early days of Wayland one of the main philosophical driving points for this alternative to the X.Org Server was that "every frame is perfect" and would forego screen tearing among other rendering impurities. Introduced now with Wayland Protocols 1.30 though is a new staging protocol to allow screen tearing.

The wlroots Wayland compositor support library that started out as a companion project to Sway is out with a shiny new feature release.

The latest daily development builds of the Blender 3D modelling software have enabled native support for Wayland. If all goes well, the Blender 3.4 release coming up will ship with this native Wayland support for Linux.

Wayland-Protocols 1.27 was released this morning by Jonas Ådahl in pushing out two new protocols under the staging umbrella.

One of the rather elusive items on the Linux desktop is High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support... There's been code in the works for years but across desktops and drivers, it's still a long-term effort getting HDR support on the Linux desktop. Even going back to 2016, with NVIDIA's cross-platform driver code the Linux desktop remained the bottleneck. There is at least some ongoing work to address this long-term issue with AMD this week presenting on the topic.

OpenJDK/Java has been making progress on implementing native "pure" Wayland toolkit integration not dependent upon X.Org/X11 or XWayland for rendering of Java GUI applications.