A stable release of the Wayland 1.20 protocol, inter-process communication mechanism, and libraries has occurred. The 1.20 branch is API and ABI backward compatible with the 1.x releases and mainly contains bug fixes and minor protocol updates. The Weston compositing server, providing code and working examples for using Wayland in desktop environments and embedded solutions, is evolving under a separate development cycle.
Key changes in the protocol:
- Official support for the FreeBSD platform has been implemented, with tests added to the continuous integration system.
- Support for the autotools build system has been discontinued, with Meson now being used instead.
- The protocol has introduced the 'wl_surface.offset' feature, allowing clients to update the surface buffer's offset independently of the buffer itself.
- The protocol now includes 'wl_output.name' and 'wl_output.description' capabilities, enabling clients to identify outputs without being tied to the xdg-output-unstable-v1 protocol extension.
- A new attribute 'type' has been added to the protocol definitions for events, and events can now be marked as destructors.
- Bug fixes have been made, including the elimination of race conditions when removing proxies in multi-threaded clients.
Changes in applications, desktop environments, and distributions related to Wayland:
- Changes have been implemented in XWayland and the proprietary NVIDIA driver to provide full hardware acceleration support for OpenGL and Vulkan in X11 applications running through the Device-Dependent X (DDX) component of XWayland.
- The main branch in all Wayland repositories has been renamed from 'master' to 'main', as the term 'master' has recently been deemed politically incorrect, reminiscent of slavery, and considered offensive by some community members.
- In Ubuntu 21.04, the default usage of Wayland has been adopted.
- In Fedora 35, Ubuntu 21.10, and RHEL 8.5, the ability to use a Wayland-based desktop has been added to systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
- The release of the compositor server Weston 9.0 has been formed, introducing the kiosk-shell interface, allowing separate applications to be launched in full-screen mode, for example, for creating internet kiosks, demonstration stands, electronic signage, and self-service terminals.
- Canonical has released the Ubuntu Frame shell with a full-screen interface for creating internet kiosks, utilizing the Wayland protocol.
- The OBS Studio streaming system has implemented support for the Wayland protocol.
- GNOME 40 and 41 continue to refine support for the Wayland protocol and the XWayland component. Wayland sessions are now permitted for systems with NVIDIA GPUs.
- The porting of the MATE desktop to Wayland has continued. The Atril document viewer, System Monitor, Pluma text editor, Terminal emulator, and other desktop components have been adapted to function independently of X11 in the Wayland environment.
- The KDE session using the Wayland protocol has been stabilized. In the KWin compositor and KDE Plasma 5.21, 5.22, and 5.23 desktop, performance has significantly improved for the Wayland-based session. Fedora Linux builds with the KDE desktop have defaulted to using Wayland.
- Firefox 93-96 has included changes addressing issues in Wayland environments related to popup handling, clipboard functionality, and scaling on screens with different DPI. The Firefox port for Wayland has been brought to feature parity with the X11 build when operating in the GNOME environment of Fedora.
- A compact user shell based on the Weston compositor called wayward has been released.
- The first release of labwc, a Wayland compositor with features reminiscent of the Openbox window manager, is now available.
- System76 is working on creating a new user environment called COSMIC, which utilizes Wayland.
- Releases for the Sway 1.6 user environment and the Wayfire 0.7 compositor, both using Wayland, have been formed.
- An updated driver for Wine has been proposed, allowing applications that use GDI and OpenGL/DirectX to run directly in a Wayland-based environment through Wine, without the need for the XWayland layer, thus eliminating Wine's dependence on the X11 protocol. The driver now includes support for Vulkan and multi-monitor configurations.
- Microsoft has implemented the ability to run Linux graphical interface applications in environments based on the WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The RAIL-Shell compositor, which uses the Wayland protocol and is based on the Weston codebase, is employed for output.
- The development method of the wayland-protocols package has changed, containing a set of protocols and extensions that enhance the capabilities of the basic Wayland protocol and provide the necessary features for building composite and user environments. servers The development stage of the 'unstable' protocols has been replaced with 'staging' to smooth the stabilization process of protocols that have been tested in production environments.
- For Wayland, a protocol extension has been prepared to restart the windowing environment without stopping applications, which will help solve the issue of terminating applications in case of a windowing environment failure.
- Necessary EGL extensions EGL_EXT_present_opaque have been added to Mesa for Wayland. Issues with transparency display in games running in Wayland-based environments have been resolved. Support for dynamic detection and loading of alternative backends GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) has been implemented to enhance Wayland support on systems with NVIDIA drivers.
- Development continues on KWinFT, a fork of KWin focused on Wayland. The project also develops the wrapland library, which implements a wrapper over libwayland for Qt/C++, continuing the development of KWayland but free from bindings to Qt.
- The Tails distribution plans to transition its user environment to use the Wayland protocol, which will increase the security of all graphical applications by improving control over how applications interact with the system.
- Wayland is used by default on mobile platforms Plasma Mobile, Sailfish, and webOS Open Source Edition,
Source: opennet.ru
