A stable release of the protocol, interprocess communication mechanism and Wayland 1.20 libraries took place. The 1.20 branch is backwards compatible at the API and ABI level with the 1.x releases and contains mostly bug fixes and minor protocol updates. The Weston Composite Server, which provides code and working examples for using Wayland in desktop environments and embedded solutions, is being developed as part of a separate development cycle.
The main changes in the protocol:
- Official support for the FreeBSD platform has been implemented, tests for which have been added to the continuous integration system.
- The autotools build system has been discontinued and is now replaced by Meson.
- Added the "wl_surface.offset" feature to the protocol to allow clients to update the offset of a surface buffer independently of the buffer itself.
- The βwl_output.nameβ and βwl_output.descriptionβ capabilities have been added to the protocol, allowing the client to identify the output without being tied to the xdg-output-unstable-v1 protocol extension.
- Protocol definitions for events introduce a new "type" attribute, and events themselves can now be marked as destructors.
- We have worked on bugs, including eliminating race conditions when deleting proxies in multi-threaded clients.
Changes in applications, desktop environments and distributions related to Wayland:
- XWayland and the proprietary NVIDIA driver have been updated to provide full support for OpenGL and Vulkan hardware acceleration in X11 applications running using XWayland's DDX (Device-Dependent X) component.
- The main branch in all Wayland repositories has been renamed from βmasterβ to βmainβ, as the word βmasterβ has recently been considered politically incorrect, reminiscent of slavery, and perceived as offensive by some community members.
- Ubuntu 21.04 has switched to using Wayland by default.
- Fedora 35, Ubuntu 21.10 and RHEL 8.5 add the ability to use a Wayland desktop on systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers.
- The Weston 9.0 composite server was released, which introduced the kiosk-shell shell, which allows you to separately launch individual applications in full-screen mode, for example, to create Internet kiosks, demonstration stands, electronic signs and self-service terminals.
- Canonical has published Ubuntu Frame, a full-screen interface for creating Internet kiosks, using the Wayland protocol.
- The OBS Studio video streaming system supports the Wayland protocol.
- GNOME 40 and 41 continue to improve support for the Wayland protocol and the XWayland component. Allow Wayland sessions for systems with NVIDIA GPUs.
- Continued porting of the MATE desktop to Wayland. To work without being tied to X11 in the Wayland environment, the Atril document viewer, System Monitor, Pluma text editor, Terminal terminal emulator and other desktop components are adapted.
- Stabilized KDE session running using the Wayland protocol. The KWin composite manager and KDE Plasma desktop 5.21, 5.22, and 5.23 have significantly improved Wayland protocol-based session performance. Fedora Linux builds with the KDE desktop have been switched to use Wayland by default.
- Firefox 93-96 includes changes to address issues in Wayland environments with pop-up handling, clipboard handling, and scaling on different DPI screens. The Firefox port for Wayland has also been brought to general parity in functionality with the build for X11 when running in the GNOME environment of Fedora.
- A compact user shell based on the Weston composite server - wayward has been published.
- The first release of labwc, a composite server for Wayland with capabilities reminiscent of the Openbox window manager, is now available.
- System76 is working on a new COSMIC user environment using Wayland.
- Releases of the user environment Sway 1.6 and the composite server Wayfire 0.7 using Wayland have been created.
- An updated driver has been proposed for Wine, which allows you to run applications using GDI and OpenGL/DirectX through Wine directly in a Wayland-based environment, without using the XWayland layer and getting rid of Wine's binding to the X11 protocol. The driver has added support for Vulkan and multi-monitor configurations.
- Microsoft has implemented the ability to run Linux applications with a graphical interface in environments based on the WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) subsystem. For the output, the RAIL-Shell composite manager is used, using the Wayland protocol and based on the Weston codebase.
- The development method for the wayland-protocols package has changed, containing a set of protocols and extensions that complement the capabilities of the base Wayland protocol and provide the capabilities necessary for building composite servers and user environments. The βunstableβ protocol development stage has been replaced by βstagingβ in order to smooth out the stabilization process for protocols that have been tested in production environments.
- A protocol extension has been prepared for Wayland to restart the windowed environment without stopping applications, which will solve the problem of terminating applications in the event of a failure in the windowed environment.
- The EGL extension EGL_EXT_present_opaque required for Wayland has been added to Mesa. Problems with displaying transparency in games running in environments based on the Wayland protocol have been resolved. Added support for dynamic discovery and loading of alternative GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) backends to improve Wayland support on systems with NVIDIA drivers.
- Development of KWinFT, a fork of KWin focused on Wayland, continues. The project also develops the wrapland library with the implementation of a wrapper over libwayland for Qt/C++, which continues the development of KWayland, but is freed from binding to Qt.
- The Tails distribution has planned to transition the 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 enabled by default in Plasma Mobile, Sailfish, webOS Open Source Edition mobile platforms,
Source: opennet.ru