Wayland's Weston 6.0 To Support XDG-Shell Stable, Helping Apps Like MPV Video Player

While the current Wayland/Weston release cycle is a bit behind schedule, it has allowed time for another addition to be made to the Weston 6.0 compositor.

Weston 6.0 now has support for the XDG-Shell stable protocol where as previously it only exposed the XDG-Shell v6 unstable protocol. The two versions of the XDG-Shell protocol are quite close so it wasn't much work involved, but newer Wayland-supported apps like the MPV video player are explicitly looking for the stable version of the protocol.

Like with the GNOME and Mir Wayland implementations, Weston will expose both versions of the XDG-Shell protocol to satisfy varying applications.

The support was merged on Friday followed by using it and having clients use it over the unstable version.

The XDG-Shell protocol is one of the most important for Linux desktops and is what allows minimizing surfaces (windows) and other functionality around desktop-style surfaces.