Release published Sway 1.12 — a new version of the tiling Wayland compositor, ideologically and configurationally compatible with i3. The release took place May 25, 2026. According to the project, Sway 1.12 includes 138 changes from 50 contributors, and for the build it now requires wlroots 0.20.0.
The main user change is the support for HDR10 when using the Vulkan renderer. This does not mean automatic HDR activation in all configurations: the capability is tied specifically to the Vulkan backend/renderer in wlroots/Sway and to the support from drivers, monitors, and the overall graphics stack. Nonetheless, for Sway, this is an important step toward full functionality with modern HDR displays in the Wayland environment.
Key changes in Sway 1.12
Support for capturing individual windows.
Sway now can allow capturing not the entire screen or workspace, but individual windows. This is important for screen recording and application demonstration during video calls: specific applications can be shown without revealing the entire desktop. In the complete change list, this feature is noted as support for toplevel capture.HDR10 output when starting Sway with the Vulkan renderer. HDR10 is one of the most common open formats for HDR video, so the change is particularly notable for users with modern monitors and multimedia scenarios.
This release adds support for color-management-v1, color-representation-v1, xdg-toplevel-tag-v1, ext-workspace-v1, and wl_fixes. In practice, this expands the foundation for color management, interaction of external components with workspaces, and more accurate identification of top-level windows.
New option —device-primaries for output color_profile.It became possible to use the color primary coordinates that the monitor reports through
. This is necessary for a more accurate description of the color characteristics of a specific display, instead of a rough tie to a preset profile. EDIDChange in the behavior of the srgb profile.The srgb profile now uses a piecewise-defined transfer function sRGB instead of a simple gamma 2.2. For the old behavior, a gamma22 profile has been added. At the same time, the effective default behavior, according to the developers, remains the same — gamma 2.2.
Official support for launching through a display manager.Official support for starting through the display manager.
Previously, launching Sway through display managers was officially considered an unsupported scenario: developers referenced old issues in login managers and could close such reports as unsupported. In Sway 1.12, this position has been revised, and launching through a display manager is now officially supported.Behavior on unsupported GPUs has been changed.
Sway no longer refuses to launch on unsupported video drivers, including the proprietary NVIDIA driver. Instead of refusing at startup, an informational message is displayed. The developers emphasize that the support policy has not changed: only the startup behavior has changed. The message can be disabled through the —unsupported-gpu parameter or the SWAY_UNSUPPORTED_GPU environment variable.Media keys via playerctl in the default configuration.
Key bindings for playerctl have been added to the default configuration file. This simplifies media player management through standard multimedia keys without manually adding typical bindings.Support for keypad slide switches.
Support for slide switches on keyboard blocks has been added. This change relates to input handling and is useful for devices where such hardware switches are presented as part of the keyboard.
In addition to major features, the release includes fixes in drag-and-drop handling, container movement, workspace operations, layer-shell, xdg-shell, scratchpad, text rendering via Pango/Cairo, and several IPC scenarios. Among the fixes are the elimination of crashes due to improper use of panel commands, on the first touch with a stylus after rebooting, when dragging a container to the edge of a workspace, and in some resize/move operations.
Sway 1.12 looks like an infrastructure-level update: the project has been upgraded to wlroots 0.20, gained groundwork for modern color management and HDR, improved screen sharing scenarios, and removed the old formal limitation on launching through display managers. For users of rolling distributions, the update is likely to appear through the usual package channels, while those who compile Sway themselves need to account for the new dependency on wlroots 0.20.0.
Source: linux.org.ru
