After six months of development, a stable release of the protocol, interprocess communication mechanism and Wayland 1.21 libraries is presented. The 1.21 branch is API and ABI backward compatible with the 1.x releases and contains mostly bug fixes and minor protocol updates. A few days ago, a corrective update was generated for the Weston 10.0.1 composite server, which is being developed as part of a separate development cycle. Weston provides code and working examples for using Wayland in desktop environments and embedded solutions.
The main changes in the protocol:
- Added support for the wl_pointer.axis_value120 event to the wl_pointer API for high-precision scrolling on mouses with a high-resolution scroll wheel.
- New functions wl_signal_emit_mutable (analogous to wl_signal_emit that supports correct operation in a situation where one signal handler removes another handler) and wl_global_get_version (allows you to find out the general API version) have been added to the server.
- The development was transferred to the GitLab platform using the infrastructure of the FreeDesktop.org project.
- Cleaned up and reworked structures and functions related to cursor customization.
- The wl_shell protocol has been marked as optional for implementation in composite servers and has been deprecated. To create custom shells, it is recommended to use the xdg_shell protocol, which provides an interface for interacting with surfaces as with windows, which allows you to move surfaces around the screen, collapse, expand, resize, etc.
- The requirements for the build system have been increased, the Meson toolkit at least version 0.56 is now required for the build. When compiling, the flag "c_std=c99" is enabled.
Changes in applications, desktop environments and distributions related to Wayland:
- In 2022, KDE plans to bring the Plasma desktop session based on the Wayland protocol to a state suitable for everyday use by a significant proportion of users. Significantly improved Wayland support in KDE Plasma 5.24 and 5.25 releases, including support for color depths greater than 8-bits per channel, DRM leasing for VR headsets, support for taking screenshots and minimizing all windows.
- In Fedora 36, ββon systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, the GNOME session based on the Wayland protocol is enabled by default, which was previously only used when using open source drivers.
- In Ubuntu 22.04, most configurations default to a desktop session based on the Wayland protocol, but use of the X server remains the default for systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers. For Ubuntu, a PPA repository with the qtwayland package has been proposed, in which fixes related to improved support for the Wayland protocol have been transferred from the Qt 5.15.3 branch, accompanied by the KDE project.
- The Sway 1.7 custom environment release using Wayland has been published.
- Nightly builds of Firefox have Wayland support enabled by default. Firefox fixes a thread-blocking issue, improves pop-up scaling, and makes the context menu work when checking spelling. According to statistics from the Firefox Telemetry service, which analyzes data received as a result of sending telemetry and users accessing Mozilla servers, the share of Firefox Linux users working in environments based on the Wayland protocol does not yet exceed 10%.
- The release of Phosh 0.15.0 mobile screen shell based on GNOME technologies and using the Phoc composite server running on top of Wayland has been published.
- Valve continues to develop the Gamescope composite server (formerly known as steamcompmgr), which uses the Wayland protocol and is used in the SteamOS 3 operating system.
- The release of the XWayland 22.1.0 DDX component has been published, which provides the launch of the X.Org Server to organize the execution of X11 applications in Wayland-based environments. The new version adds support for the DRM Lease protocol, which is used to form a stereo image with different buffers for the left and right eyes when outputting to virtual reality helmets.
- The labwc project is developing a composite server for Wayland with features reminiscent of the Openbox window manager (the project is touted as an attempt to create an alternative to Openbox for Wayland).
- The first release of LWQt, a Wayland-based custom shell variant of LXQt, is available.
- Collabora, as part of the wxrd project, is developing a new composite server based on Wayland for virtual reality systems.
- The release of the Wine-wayland 7.7 project has been published, which allows using Wine in environments based on the Wayland protocol, without using XWayland and X11 components.
- Aaron Plattner, one of the leading developers of NVIDIA proprietary drivers, has published a report on the status of Wayland support in NVIDIA drivers.
- The Weston Composite Server 10.0 has been released, which adds support for the libseat library, which provides functions for accessing shared input and output devices, and also adds color management components that allow you to convert colors, perform gamma correction, and work with color profiles.
- Continued porting the MATE desktop to Wayland.
- System76 is working on a new COSMIC user environment using Wayland.
- 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.
- Wayland is enabled by default in Plasma Mobile, Sailfish, webOS Open Source Edition mobile platforms,
Source: opennet.ru