First Wayland Release: Wayland 0.85 With Weston

Kristian Høgsberg has just announced Wayland 0.85 and Weston 0.85, which mark the first official releases of Wayland and its reference compositor, respectively.

While Wayland/Weston 0.85 is now out there, this is just one of their pre-1.0 snapshots. This is just a first-shot for those that have been waiting for Wayland to appear in some released form before either packaging it up and/or beginning work on porting their application/desktop to the eventual X.Org-replacement.

From Kristian's announcement:

This is the first real release of Wayland and Weston. Wayland is the protocol and IPC mechanism while Weston is the reference compositor implementation. The 0.85 branch in both repositories is going to be protocol and interface stable. We have a series of protocol changes on the table before 1.0 but this branch marks a stable point before we jump into that.

We may do more 0.85 releases down the road if there's interest and something sufficiently embarrassing shows up.

At the end of January was when I mentioned Wayland was planning for a 1.0 release and then at FOSDEM it was confirmed a stable Wayland 1.0 release is coming this year. At the Brussels event was also a guide for writing Wayland compositors and an interesting Wayland tech discussion. It also was discussed how to handle the migration of applications from X to Wayland.

When Wayland 0.90 is released, it will mark the point at which the protocol and interfaces are frozen for the 1.0 release. The Wayland 0.90 series will basically be the release candidates.

In talking with Kristian in Brussels, he doesn't expect Wayland 1.0 to "conquer the world" but there will be many more releases coming past version 1.0 in the succeeding months. Wayland is coming together quite quickly now and it will be very interesting to see what shape it takes by year's end.