Wayland News Archives

For years Electron apps were notorious for continuing to depend upon X11/XWayland and not jive well with the modern Wayland experience on modern Linux desktops. But for the past several months, Wayland has been well supported out-of-the-box on upstream Electron. An Electron blog post this week outlined the technical work done for achieving good Wayland support.

Simon Ser just released Wayland 1.25.

Simon Ser announced the release today of Wayland 1.25 RC1 (Wayland v1.24.91) in working toward this next stable release.

Hyprland 0.54 was released today as what's described as a "a massive update with no understatement" to this Wayland compositor.

After delays, Weston 15.0 shipped this morning as the latest feature release to this reference Wayland compositor. Weston 15.0 comes in heavy on new features - including a Vulkan renderer in experimental form.

Version 0.20 of the popular wlroots Wayland support library is nearing its official release. Over the past week were two release candidates for wlroots 0.20 were published for this library used by Sway, Wayfire, Cage, Gamescope, and numerous other Wayland compositors.

After the merge request was opened back in 2023 and after going through 628 comments/activity, merged now to Wayland Protocols is the experimental zones "xx-zones" implementation for area-limited window positioning.

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by both modern X.Org Server and Wayland desktop environments.

TigerVNC 1.16 is out today for this high performance, multi-platform VNC server and client implementation. Most notable with TigerVNC 1.16 is "w0vncserver" as a new server for sharing Wayland desktops.

Michel Dänzer of Red Hat has kicked off 2026 xorg-server activity with landing a patch series enhancing the Resize and Rotate (RandR) extension support under XWayland for improving mode handling by X11 clients.

Announced today on the Wayland mailing list is wl-proxy as a Rust crate for proxying Wayland connections and intercepting/manipulating Wayland messages.

Hyprland 0.53 was released today as the last feature update to this Wayland compositor for 2025.

One of the interesting open-source projects to come about this year was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer using Wayland. Wayback could be used by default on Alpine Linux next year among other distributions. For ending out 2025 development, Wayback 0.3 is now available.

After being delayed by three months to allow additional time for new features to land, Weston 15.0 Alpha 1 is out today as a big feature release for this reference Wayland compositor.

Following the Color Management protocol introduced in Wayland Protocols 1.41, out today is Wayland Protocols 1.47 with various revisions to that color management and HDR support.

Niri 25.11 is now available as the latest feature release for this Rust-written, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.

Wayland Protocols 1.46 released this evening with new experimental protocols for text improvements as well as refinements to the color management protocol for HDR.

With the upcoming release of Weston 15.0, this Wayland reference compositor will finally feature a Vulkan renderer. For those curious about its potential, a presentation recently outlined the current state of this Vulkan code path.

System76 engineer Victoria Brekenfeld and Red Hat engineer Sebastian Wick presented at the recent XDC2025 developer conference with their hopes of finally fixing the multi-GPU experience on Linux. As part of this is getting the necessary Wayland protocols in order as well as a new gpu-daemon service for proper multi-GPU handling for the Linux desktop.

Hyprland 0.52 is available today as the latest feature update for this alternative Wayland compositor.

Casilda 1.0 is out today as the Wayland compositor widget for the GTK4 toolkit.

Hyprland 0.51 is now available as the latest feature release for this unique Wayland compositor.

Miracle-WM is the Wayland compositor built atop Canonical's Mir project with a focus on tiling and inspired by Sway/i3. Miracle-WM 0.7 is now available for advancing this Mir-powered Wayland experience with additional functionality now in place.

Niri 25.08 is out this week as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Notable now is adding xwayland-satellite integration for offering legacy X11 app support.

Wayfire 0.10 was released this week and its integration with the underlying wlroots rendering code has been overhauled. In turn this opens up Wayfire to having experimental support for rendering using the Vulkan API.

In time for some weekend testing, Wayback 0.2 is now available for this X11 compatibility layer leveraging Wayland components. Wayback 0.2 remains at an alpha quality state but more functionality is now wired up.

Libinput 1.29 was just released as the newest version of this open-source input handling library used on the modern Linux desktop both under X.Org and Wayland environments.

The Hyprland Wayland compositor that is popular with some Linux enthusiasts today formally announced Hyprperks, its new paid subscription service offering a "premium desktop experience" and other benefits.

Hyprland 0.50 is out today as the newest feature release for this Wayland compositor focused on delivering a lot of Linux desktop bling.

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.29, the newest version of this input handling library used across both X.Org and Wayland environments with the modern Linux desktop.

Wayback began recently as an experimental X11 compatibility layer for non-Wayland desktop environments to leverage Wayland components. While still in early form, the project has already taken off from being a personal GitHub project to now being hosted on FreeDesktop.org alongside other projects such as Wayland and the X.Org Server itself plus other prominent software like Mesa and GStreamer and much more.

Minutes ago Simon Ser announced the official release of Wayland 1.24.

A few days ago Wayback was announced as an X11 compatibility layer for X11 desktops environments leveraging a rootful XWayland server. While currently experimental, the hope is that it will be production-ready next year and Alpine Linux is looking at using it by default for its X11 environment.

Wayback is a new open-source project working on providing an X11 compatibility layer for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components with a rootful XWayland server.

Introduced with this week's Wayland Protocols 1.45 release is adding the Pointer Warp protocol to staging. The SDL hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games was quick to merge support for using the native Pointer Warp protocol on Wayland.

Wayland Protocols 1.45 was released today with new staging and experimental protocols for Wayland compositors to begin rolling out.

Simon Ser announced the release of Sway 1.11 on Sunday as the newest feature update to this popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor from which the wlroots library was originally born.

Merged today for Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager component is a built-in Wayland compositor using wlroots.

After being under discussion since January of 2024, the ext-background-effect-v1 staging protocol proposal by KDE developer Xaver Hugl has finally been merged to the Wayland-Protocols repository. This new Wayland protocol is intended for handling effects like background blur on terminals.

Following the recent decision to no longer issue alpha or beta releases of Wayland, the Wayland 1.24 release candidate was issued on Thursday in working toward that next release.

Ongoing Wayland release manager Simon Ser has proposed doing away with alpha and beta releases moving forward as a sign of Wayland's maturity and to ease the release management process.

Niri 25.05 is out today as the newest major step forward for this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that has developed a devoted following.

Hyprland 0.49 released on Thursday as the newest version of this unique Wayland compositor project.

Labwc 0.8.4 is out as the newest stable update to this wlroots-based, window-stacking Wayland compositor.

Wayland Protocols 1.44 released on Sunday and with it comes one new protocol addition.

Sway 1.11-rc1 is out today as a test release ahead of this next Wayland compositor feature release. Sway 1.11 is bringing a number of new features for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor while also building off the new features laid out in the recent wlroots 0.19-rc1 library.

Wayland Protocols 1.43 is out this morning with one new protocol: xdg_toplevel_tag_v1.

While the first quarter is coming to an end, there has already been immense progress this year to the Wayland protocols and compositors along with associated Linux desktop software for embracing this alternative to legacy X11/X.Org. From HDR color management seeing much adoption this quarter to Wine Wayland becoming more viable and the large number of Wayland compositors maturing, it was a pretty incredible quarter.

The wlroots library used by the Sway compositor and other Wayland compositors has merged support for the color-management-v1 protocol that is notable for enabling High Dynamic Range (HDR) display use under Linux.

With the FreeDesktop.org GitLab infrastructure getting back up, Wayland Protocols 1.42 was released today as the newest version of this official set of protocols for Wayland compositors.