After six months of development a stable version of the Wayland protocol 1.21 was presented, this new API and ABI being backwards compatible with versions 1.x and contains mainly bug fixes and minor protocol updates.
A few days ago, a corrective update for Weston Composite Server 10.0.1 was formed, 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.
Main news of Wayland 1.21
In this new version that introduced added support for the wl_pointer.axis_value120 event to the wl_pointer API for high-precision mouse scrolling with a high-resolution scroll wheel.
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version is that new features have been added to the server wl_signal_emit_mutable (similar to wl_signal_emit which supports correct operation in a situation where one signal driver removes another driver) and wl_global_get_version (allows you to find out the general version of the API).
The protocol wl_shell has been marked as optional for deployment to composite servers and has been deprecated. To create custom shells, it is recommended to use the xdg_shell protocol, which provides an interface to interact with surfaces as with windows, allowing you to move surfaces around the screen, collapse, expand, resize, etc.
Also highlighted are the clean and reworked structures and functions related to with the cursor customization, plus 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 "c_std=c99" flag is enabled.
Furthermore, it is also worth mentioning that the development of the project was transferred to the GitLab platform using the infrastructure of the FreeDesktop.org project.
Moreover, It is also worth noting the changes in applications, desktop environments and distributions related to Wayland:
- KDE plans in 2022 to bring the Wayland protocol-based Plasma desktop session to a state suitable for daily use by a significant proportion of users.
- In Fedora 36, on systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, the Wayland protocol-based GNOME session is enabled by default, which was previously only used when using open source drivers.
- In Ubuntu 22.04, most defaults to a Wayland protocol-based desktop session, but using the X server remains the default for systems with NVIDIA proprietary drivers. For Ubuntu, a PPA repository has been proposed with the qtwayland package, in which the fixes related to the improvement of support for the Wayland protocol have been transferred from the Qt 5.15.3 branch, accompanied by the KDE project.
- Firefox nightly builds have Wayland support enabled by default. Firefox fixes a thread blocking issue, improves popup scaling, and makes the context menu work when checking spelling.
- Valve continues to develop the Gamescope composite server (previously known as steamcompmgr), which uses the Wayland protocol and is used in the SteamOS 3 operating system.
- The XWayland 22.1.0 DDX component release has been released, which provides the X.Org server release for orchestrating 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 sent to virtual reality headsets.
- The labwc project is developing a composite server for Wayland with features reminiscent of the Openbox window manager (the project is promoted as an attempt to create an Openbox alternative for Wayland).
- The first version of LWQt , a Wayland-based custom shell variant of LXQt, is available.
- Collabora, as part of the wxrd project, is developing a new Wayland-based composite server for virtual reality systems.
- The Wine-wayland 7.7 project release has been published, which allows Wine to be used in environments based on the Wayland protocol, without using the XWayland and X11 components.
Source: https://lists.freedesktop.org