It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its latest drivers, LXQt and Xfce and others working more on Wayland support, and the continued climb of various innovative Wayland compositors.
Plus this year saw the Wine Wayland driver pan out in great shape, more software better handling native Wayland environments, and other improvements made throughout the open-source world. For the vast majority of Linux desktop users now, running a native Wayland session is very viable with similar performance and feature parity to using a classic X.org session. I’m trying to remember the last time I ran into any Wayland specific issues myself… It’s been quite a while now.
For summing up the Wayland year, below is a look at the most popular Wayland news of 2024 for celebrating the many achievements this year.
KDE Plasma 6.1 Beta Released With Wayland Explicit Sync, Input Capture Portal & More
The beta release of Plasma 6.1 is now available for testing over the US holiday weekend.
KDE On The Importance Of Wayland Explicit Sync
With the recent Mesa 24.1 support for Wayland explicit sync with Vulkan drivers, GNOME merging explicit sync support, Wayland-Protocols 1.34 introducing linux-drm-syncobj, and XWayland explicit sync also nearing the state of being merged, there’s been much talk recently about Wayland explicit sync. KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl has written a detailed blog post for those interested in the topic.
KDE Plasma 6.1 Released With Easier Remote Desktop Support, Wayland Explicit Sync
Right on schedule today KDE released Plasma 6.1 as the first feature update to the Plasma 6 desktop stack that debuted back in February.
KDE’s KWin Merges Wayland Explicit Sync Support
A day after explicit sync support was merged for XWayland, a week after explicit sync support for Mesa Vulkan drivers hit Mesa 24.1, and GNOME’s Mutter enabling explicit sync at the end of March, KDE’s KWin compositor has now merged its Wayland explicit sync support!
KDE Implements More Wayland Bits, Lowers Bug Count To Match Plasma 5 Stability
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap that highlights all of the interesting KDE desktop changes to have landed over the past week.
Xfce 4.20 Aiming For Usable Wayland Support While Maintaining X11 Compatibility
Xfce developers have updated their Wayland roadmap this week to reflect their latest plans around the Xfce 4.20 release.
Ubuntu 24.10 Now Defaults To Wayland On NVIDIA
With Ubuntu 24.10 due for release in October one of the expressed planned changes has been NVIDIA defaulting to using Wayland rather than X11 for the default desktop session. As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.
KDE Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.14 Brings New Capabilities
Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.14 is out today for providing the set of Wayland protocol XML files for currently non-standard protocols that are relied upon by the Plasma desktop with KWin compositor.
KDE Reduces CPU Usage On Wayland When Moving The Pointer & Other Fixes
After a few weeks hiatus due to the holidays, KDE developer Nate Graham is back in the saddle with his weekly development reports around KDE.
NVIDIA Shares Wayland Driver Roadmap, Encourages Vulkan Wayland Compositors
At the X.Org Developer’s Conference (XDC 2024) happening this week in Montreal, NVIDIA shared a road-map around their Wayland plans as well as encouraging Wayland compositors to target the Vulkan API.
Wayland Color Management Protocol Might Finally Be Close To Merging
In what could be a wonderful holiday for the Linux desktop, it looks like the Wayland color management protocol might finally be close to merging after four years in discussion.
LXQt Desktop Now “100%” Ready For Wayland
The lightweight LXQt desktop environment is fully ready to take on the Wayland world.
NVIDIA 550 Linux Beta Driver Released With Many Fixes, VR Displays & Better (X)Wayland
For going along with today’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card launch (Linux review in the days ahead due to late arrival of my RTX 40 series hardware), NVIDIA has published their first R550 series Linux driver beta. The NVIDIA 550.40.07 Linux driver is now available with many bug fixes and a few new features.
Google Chrome Adds VA-API Video Acceleration On Wayland
One of the limitations of Google Chrome’s Wayland support has been the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) not being supported for GPU-based video acceleration as it’s directly targeted the libva-x11 library. But with code merged on Friday to Chromium, libva-drm is now used to allow for working VA-API acceleration on X11 or Wayland.
KDE Plasma 6.3 To Improve XWayland Window Resizing
KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii is out with an insightful blog post today on how XWayland window resizing has been enhanced for Plasma 6.3 so that resizing X11 clients will now appear much more polished than the status quo.
VirtualBox 7.1 Beta Released With Modernized GUI, Wayland Support For Clipboard Sharing
Oracle today released the first public beta of their VirtualBox 7.1 virtualization software.
New GNOME Mutter Code Prepares Fractional Scaling For XWayland
A merge request was opened this week for plumbing fractional scaling support for XWayland clients running on the GNOME Mutter compositor.
NVIDIA 560.35.03 Linux Driver Released With More Wayland Fixes
Building off the prior NVIDIA 560 beta driver releases, the NVIDIA 560.35.03 stable Linux driver was released today for providing the latest official NVIDIA graphics/compute support for Linux systems.
Niri Debuts As A Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor Inspired By PaperWM
The newest Wayland compositor on the scene with its first stable release is Niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the PaperWM GNOME Shell extesnsion.
SDL Developers Weigh Reverting Wayland Over X11 For SDL 3.0
With the SDL library that’s widely-used by cross-platform games with the current SDL 3.0 development code it prefers Wayland over X11, but a new pull request would temporarily revert that on the basis of the Wayland ecosystem still not being up to par.
Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blog. He’s also taken up a new task: further accelerating Wayland protocol development.
Godot 4.3 Game Engine To Feature Native Wayland Support
The newest feature tacked onto the Godot 4.3 open-source game engine is featuring native support for Wayland on Linux.
Wine 9.22 Enables Wayland Driver By Default
Wine 9.22 is out this weekend ahead of the Wine 10.0-rc1 in two weeks.
NVIDIA 555.58 Stable Linux Driver Brings Wayland Explicit Sync, GSP Firmware Default
The NVIDIA 555.58 Linux driver has debuted this morning as the first stable version in the R555 driver series. The NVIDIA 555 Linux driver is the most exciting in recent times with offering Wayland explicit sync support, more stable Wayland support in general, and GSP firmware is now used by default on RTX 20 / Turing and newer GPUs where the GPU System Processor is present.
XWayland Nukes The NVIDIA EGLStream Backend
XWayland had targeted both the Generic Buffer Management (GBM) and EGLStream APIs due to NVIDIA not supporting GBM like all of the other Linux drivers. But now that the NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics driver has been boasting GBM support and advancing with their Wayland platform support in general, XWayland is letting go of the EGLStream mess.
