WXRD Is A New Wayland Compositor Focused On XR/VR Use-Cases

For the Valve-funded Xrdesktop has allowed GNOME and KDE desktops to be VR-aware, Collabora has been developing WXRD as a standalone Wayland compositor for XR/VR use-cases.

WXRD is a standalone Wayland compositor for the xrdesktop to offer better integration than what can be achieved using the existing patches around KDE KWin and GNOME Shell integration. WXRD is built atop the wl-roots Wayland support library as well as WXRC as a Wayland XR compositor for VR headsets. WXRC hasn't seen too much activity lately while now Collabora is pushing ahead with WXRD as the new XR/VR Wayland compositor.

As for its design approach, "wxrd follows a similar approach as Simula VR (haskell, godot) or Stardust (stereokit), where the XR desktop is a standalone application that will not mirror existing windows from a 2D desktop, but only show windows in XR that have been explicitly started on this XR desktop. Other noteworthy pioneers are motorcar, a kwayland based VR Wayland compositor, and safespaces, an entire custom Wayland and X11 implementation. What sets xrdesktop apart from these alternatives is that xrdesktop's tech stack is focused on a small footprint. Instead of depending on large frameworks and libraries, xrdesktop with wxrd focuses on minimal dependencies and a manageable scope."

More details on WXRD can be found via the Collabora blog.