Niri 25.08 is out this week as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Notable now is adding xwayland-satellite integration for offering legacy X11 app support.
While many Wayland compositors have integrated XWayland support for X11 app/game support, Niri has resisted. Niri refrained from supporting XWayland directly due to a lot of integration work needed, a preference to cater the code just to Wayland, Niri lacks a global coordinate system needed by X11, and various other design decisions as well as limitations.
With Niri 25.08 though they have integrated xwayland-satellite as a separate open-source project providing rootless XWayland integration. With xwayland-satellite it’s able to provide XWayland support to any compositor that has xdg_wm_base and viewporter protocol support. Plus xwayland-satellite will optionally leverage other Wayland protocols for enhanced support, but long story short it makes lighter work of compositors wanting to support XWayland for X11 app/game use but without as many headaches.
Niri 25.08 also introduces screen reader support, modal exit configuration, improvements to its screenshot UI, screencasting fixes, reading the keyboard layout from systemd-localed, ext-workspace Wayland protocol support, and a variety of other enhancements.
The Niri project has also revamped its Wiki area and rolled out a new project logo.
For more information on Niri 25.08 or to download this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor, visit the project’s GitHub.
