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⇱ Niri 25.08 Wayland Compositor Introduces xwayland-satellite Support - Phoronix


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Niri 25.08 Wayland Compositor Introduces xwayland-satellite Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 3 September 2025 at 10:50 AM EDT. 16 Comments
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.

While many Wayland compositors have integrated XWayland support for X11 app/game support, Niri has resisted. Niri refrained from supporting XWayland directly due to a lot of integration work needed, a preference to cater the code just to Wayland, Niri lacks a global coordinate system needed by X11, and various other design decisions as well as limitations.

With Niri 25.08 though they have integrated xwayland-satellite as a separate open-source project providing rootless XWayland integration. With xwayland-satellite it's able to provide XWayland support to any compositor that has xdg_wm_base and viewporter protocol support. Plus xwayland-satellite will optionally leverage other Wayland protocols for enhanced support, but long story short it makes lighter work of compositors wanting to support XWayland for X11 app/game use but without as many headaches.

👁 Niri project screenshot


Niri 25.08 also introduces screen reader support, modal exit configuration, improvements to its screenshot UI, screencasting fixes, reading the keyboard layout from systemd-localed, ext-workspace Wayland protocol support, and a variety of other enhancements.

The Niri project has also revamped its Wiki area and rolled out a new project logo.

For more information on Niri 25.08 or to download this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor, visit the project's GitHub.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.