Wayland News Archives

Wayland developers have prepared the release of Weston 16.0 Alpha 1 for this reference Wayland compositor with new features.

The Wine Wayland driver continues to be improved upon for bettering the experience around Windows games/applications running natively on Wayland Linux desktops without having to go through X11/XWayland. The newest feature merged is alpha modifier support for opacity handling of surfaces.

Simon Ser just published Wayland Protocols 1.49 as the latest version for this primary set of Wayland protocol definitions.

Canonical today released Mir 2.27 as the latest version of this set of compositor libraries for easily building Wayland-based shells on Linux and fitting into the Ubuntu Linux paradigm.

It looks like Google's Chromium Embedded Framework "CEF" could finally be enjoying nice native Wayland support soon!

In addition to the release today of Sway 1.12 for that i3-inspired Wayland compositor, Labwc 0.20 is also out today as another wlroots-based Wayland compositor.

Sway 1.12 is out today as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor powered by the wlroots library.

Hyprland 0.55 is out today as a big feature update for this Wayland-based compositor.

Weston 16.0 could ship by the end of June with good color management and HDR support along with other new features for this reference Wayland compositor.

WayVNC 0.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server that works with Wayland compositors leveraging the wlroots library.

Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan announced today the availability of XWayland 24.1.11 that brings a few bug/regression fixes.

Niri 26.04 is out today as the latest feature update to this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.

Cage as the Wayland compositor providing a kiosk mode for single, maximized apps is out with a new feature release more than six months after its prior version.

Miracle-WM as the Wayland compositor / window manager built atop Canonical's Mir project is out with a big new feature release. This "hackable" and i3/Sway-inspired Wayland compositor has landed a WebAssembly-based plug-in system for opening up new possibilities as well as a new Rust API with this week's v0.9 release.

Wayland Protocols 1.48 is out today with the long-awaited XDG Session Management protocol in tow as well as several new experimental protocols.

A merge request for Wayland Protocols was opened today for introducing "xx-fractional-scale-v2" as an experimental protocol to address current shortcomings with current Wayland fractional scaling. There is also a KDE KWin compositor merge request already out for review that implements this xx-fractional-scale-v2 protocol.

Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the "heavy lifting" of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager.

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.