Labwc is a wlroots based window stack compositor for wayland, inspired by openbox
The new version of labwc 0.7 has already been released and although arrives with a significant number of additions and corrections, The developers mention that this release has focused on migrating labwc to wlroots 0.17 and sorting out the regressions
For those who do not know about labwc, you should know that the wlroots library is used as a basis, developed by the developers of the Sway user environment and which provides basic functions to organize the work of the composite administrator based on Wayland.
Main novelties of labwc 0.7
As mentioned at the beginning, this new version stands out for the transition to the new branch of wlroots 0.17 library, which improves its Vulkan rendering code, xwayland-shell-v1 to improve the reliability of XWayland, as well as adding support for new Wayland protocols and other improvements.
Another highlight of labwc 0.7 is the support for wayland cursor-shape-v1 protocol, which allows you to customize the appearance of the cursor by transmitting a series of images of the cursor.
In addition to this, we can also find the support for the Wayland fractional scaling protocol. This protocol allows the composite manager to transmit non-integer surface scale values, allowing the client to specify a more precise size of buffers for wp_viewport objects, compared to rounded scale information.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Displaying icons in window headers is now supported.
- Improvements in the interface for switching between windows- This allows you to move backwards by pressing the left or up arrow.
- Settings for thumbnails in the interface to switch between virtual desktops- Introduced osd.workspace-switcher.boxes.{width,height} setting to determine thumbnail size.
- New Actions and Options:
Added VirtualOutputAdd and VirtualOutputRemove actions to add and remove virtual output devices.
Implemented ResizeTo action to specifically resize.
Added ToggleOmnipresent action and “Always in visible workspace” option to always place content on the active desktop. - _NET_WORKAREA property for applications that use XWayland: which makes it possible to understand the size of the free area on the screen not occupied by panels. This is used, for example, in Qt when calculating the size of popup menus.
- Fixed issue with XWayland surfaces completely off screen not generating confirmation events and therefore preventing them from moving on screen.
- Fixed xwayland.c null pointer dereference causing a crash with CLions.
- Avoided overriding XWayland's maximized/fullscreen/tiled geometry to fix an issue where some XWayland views (example: xfce4 terminal) don't end up with exactly the correct geometry when tiled.
finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
How to install LABWC on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install this composer on their system, they must follow the instructions that we share below.
The distribution that has the simplest installation method is Fedora and to install labwc, just open a terminal and in it we are going to type:
sudo dnf install labwc
Those who are users of Arch Linux, Manjaro or any other distribution derived from Arch Linux, they must open a terminal and in it they will type the following command to download the necessary dependencies:
sudo pacman -S meson wlroots cairo pango libxml2 glib2
After that, they will get the LABWC source code by running the following command in the terminal:
git clone https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc cd labwc meson build ninja -C build
Now, for those who are users of Debian, UBuntu or any other distribution based on either of these two, they must type the following in the terminal:
git clone https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc cd labwc meson build ninja -C build
For those who are interested in learning more about LABWC, they can visit the site of the project on GitHub.