XWayland 21.1 Planned For Release In Mid-March

Plans are moving forward for providing standalone XWayland packages that would ship the latest XWayland code for allowing X11 clients within Wayland environments, separate from X.Org Server releases as has been the bundling case to date.

Given the elusive X.Org Server 1.21 with no one stepping up to manage that release and get it shipped, Fedora / Red Hat is resorting to shipping standalone XWayland packages based on that X.Org Server Git code but only providing the XWayland bits. While the conventional X.Org Server code seldom seems improvements these days, the XWayland area does remain quite active with performance optimizations, new features, and other fixes.

This standalone packaging will allow Fedora and any other distribution vendors who want it the ability to easily have the latest X11 client support on Wayland without having to ship the bleeding-edge X.Org Server Git or similar procedures. Red Hat is instituting these standalone releases as part of Fedora 34 due out this spring.

Michel Dänzer who has been working on coordinating this and managing the upstream work announced the plans for the inaugural XWayland 21.1 release. He plans to create the XWayland-21.1 branch in early February, a release candidate in mid-February, a possible second release candidate in early March, and to ship the 21.1 final release in mid-March.

The 17 March target puts it out well ahead of the Fedora 34 release aiming for the end of April.