While the first quarter is coming to an end, there has already been immense progress this year to the Wayland protocols and compositors along with associated Linux desktop software for embracing this alternative to legacy X11/X.Org. From HDR color management seeing much adoption this quarter to Wine Wayland becoming more viable and the large number of Wayland compositors maturing, it was a pretty incredible quarter.
With the near-daily news on Phoronix around new Wayland innovations and compositor progress, here’s a recap of the most viewed Wayland news on Phoronix as we wrap-up Q1-2025. All of the Wayland HDR adoption this quarter was fantastic, both KDE Plasma (KWin) and GNOME Shell (Mutter) are delivering solid Wayland experiences, user-space software like Wine and Chrome/Chromium seeing enhanced support, and other Wayland compositor/desktop innovations have been fantastic. If this keeps up the rest of the year, Wayland should have a very lucrative 2025.
Here’s the 20 most popular Wayland news stories on Phoronix for the first quarter:
KDE Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 Brings Power/Performance vs. Color Accuracy Preference
KDE developers today released Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16 as the newest feature update to this set of non-standard Wayland protocols used by the Plasma desktop.
KDE’s KWin Wayland & X11 Code Are Now Split, KWin_X11 To Be Maintained Until Plasma 7
Yesterday marked the milestone of KWin’s kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland code being split up. The Wayland and X11 code for the KWin compositor is now separate from each other but can be co-installable for systems wanting to support both X11 and Wayland environments.
Wayland Color Management & HDR Protocol Support Merged
As a quick follow-up to the article earlier today… The Wayland Color Management and HDR protocol support is now merged to upstream Wayland Protocols!
PCSX2 Enables Wayland Support By Default – After Previously Calling It “Super Broken”
The latest open-source project enabling Wayland support by default today is PCSX2 as the PlayStation 2 game emulator for Linux and other platforms.
Wine 10.0 Released With Native Wayland Support, Better HiDPI
As was expected this week, Wine 10.0 stable is now available as the newest annual feature release to this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers’ CrossOver software.
KDE KWin Lands FIFO v1 Wayland Support, GNOME 48 Squeezed In XDG Toplevel Drag v1
There is some new Wayland protocol support activity this week worth mentioning for both the KDE Plasma and GNOME desktops.
GNOME’s Mutter Now Supports The Wayland Cursor Shape Protocol
Racing toward the GNOME 48 finish line, developers have remained busy squeezing some remaining bits into place for this big open-source desktop release.
Eight New Security Vulnerabilities Reported Against The X.Org Server & XWayland
Eight new security issues have now been made public around the X.Org Server codebase that also impact XWayland.
Hyprland 0.47 Wayland Compositor Delivers Experimental HDR, GPU Hotplugging
Hyprland 0.47 is out to begin a new week with some exciting enhancements to this visuals-focused Wayland compositor.
Wine Wayland Merge Request Opened For Clipboard Support
While Wine 10.0 recently debuted with the initial Wine Wayland driver, that native Wayland support is still in early form with various limitations and yet-to-be-implemented features… One of the newly-opened merge requests for filling in another gap is clipboard support for the Wine Wayland driver.
GNOME Mutter 48.rc Released With Wayland Color Management, Dynamic Triple Buffering
Ahead of the GNOME 48 stable release due out later this month, tagged now is the Mutter “48.rc” release candidate milestone. While the feature freeze passed last month, there has been a lot of last minute improvements merged for Mutter to squeeze into this GNOME 48 release.
Chromium Embedded Framework “CEF” Seeing Progress On Wayland Support
One of the important pieces of open-source software still working toward proper Wayland support is the Chromium Embedded Framework “CEF” that in turn is depended upon by software like Steam, OBS Studio, Spotify, and many other software packages for having an in-app browser-type experience. The good news is there has been some recent progress on native Wayland support for CEF.
Wine 10.3 Wires Up Wayland Driver Clipboard Handling, Vulkan Video Decode Within WineD3D
Wine 10.3 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to run Windows applications and games under Linux and other platforms.
SDL & MPV Media Player Land Support For Wayland Color Management / HDR
Following the upstream Wayland Protocols repository landing the Wayland color management protocol for enabling HDR support and this morning’s release of Wayland Protocols 1.41, the SDL library and MPV media player are the first two clients supporting this now-official protocol.
GNOME 48 Mutter Merges Wayland’s wp_color_management_v1 Support
As an exciting late addition to the GNOME 48 codebase ahead of its stable release in mid-March, the Wayland color management “wp_color_management_v1” protocol support has been merged!
Niri 25.02 & Labwc 0.8.3 Wayland Compositors Released
The Niri and Labwc Wayland compositor projects are both out with new releases this weekend to further their efforts.
MPV 0.40 Media Player Released With Wayland HDR Support
MPV 0.40 was just released as the newest version of this open-source media player derived from MPlayer/MPlayer2. With the MPV 0.40 release there is support for HDR videos on Wayland using the new color management protocol along with a variety of other new features.
Wayland Protocols 1.41 Released With Color Management Support
Wayland Protocols 1.41 is shipping today with the color management protocol added for enabling high dynamic range (HDR) support on the Wayland-powered Linux desktop.
Hyprland Wayland Compositor Lands HDR / Color Management Support
Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays.
Budgie 10.10 Desktop Releasing This Quarter As Wayland-Only
For fans of the Budgie desktop environment that got its start out of the Solus Linux distribution, the Budgie 10.10 release expected later this quarter will be their first release that is Wayland-only.
