After four months of development, the release of project Wayback 0.3 has been published, enabling the launch of desktop environments reliant on the X11 protocol, using components based on Wayland. Wayback is a stripped-down Wayland compositor that supports only the necessary features to run a full-screen X11 session using Xwayland. The project's code is written in C and is distributed under the MIT license.
The project was created by the developers of the Alpine distribution to simplify moving away from the classic X.org Server and is being developed within the freedesktop.org infrastructure. The Alpine distribution intends to retain only the components necessary for Wayland and Xwayland, implementing the launch of X11 desktop environments on top of them, which will eliminate the need for a separate X server in the repositories and reduce maintenance costs for X11 applications.
The Wayback code is based on tinywl, a reference compositor from the developers of the wlroots library, whose functionality has been cut down to the minimum necessary for isolated Xwayland execution. It is expected that in the future, Wayback may serve as a complete replacement for the Xorg executable (/usr/bin/X). server developed by the wlroots library, whose functionality is reduced to the minimum needed for standalone operation of Xwayland. At this stage of development, Wayback is presented as an experimental system, ready for daily use, but it does not implement all planned functionality and does not guarantee backward compatibility or a lack of bugs. Testing packages for Wayback are built for Alpine Linux, Nix, T2, Arch Linux, ALT Linux, and Fedora.
In the new release:
- The command-line options parser has been redesigned. Support for specific X.org options, such as vtXX, has been implemented. Stubs for unsupported X.org options have been added.
- Wayback packages for Alpine Linux have been moved from the 'testing' repository to the 'community' repository, indicating that Wayback will be included in the stable releases of Alpine Linux.
- Wayback packages have been added to Fedora 42 and 43 repositories.
- The reference manuals have been updated.
Future plans include: using Xwayland in rootless mode (without a root window, each X11 application launched in XWayland has a separate window in the Wayland environment); multi-monitor configurations; screen blanking through DPMS; mouse pointer confinement (preventing movement beyond a certain area on the screen); continuing the implementation of X.org command-line options.
Source: opennet.ru
