XWayland 21.1 Standalone Released To Offer Better X11 Client On Wayland Experience

With no one willing to step up and manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release and see it through for maintenance, Red Hat engineers who often managed those xorg-server releases are now moving ahead with standalone XWayland releases with that code pulled out of doing a full X.Org Server release and instead isolated to the XWayland bits for handling of X11 clients under Wayland. Today marks the inaugural release with XWayland 21.1.0.

XWayland 21.1 is out today as the first standalone release, which came after separating out the rest of the X.Org Server code-base that's been long brewing with new features for the elusive X.Org Server 1.21 release. Michel Dänzer of Red Hat managed this inaugural XWayland standalone release with Fedora 34 planning to make use of this standalone package to provide the newer XWayland support without having the baggage of having to ship a X.Org Server Git snapshot or commit resources to the v1.21 release. Ubuntu developers have also expressed interest in possibly using this standalone XWayland package too. Assuming X.Org Server 1.21 doesn't magically appear this year with any organization stepping up to manage the release, we'll likely see more Linux distributions adopting this standalone release especially with more desktop Linux distributions finally transitioning to Wayland now that more desktops/compositors are offering a first-rate experience.

Compared to the code in X.Org Server 1.20.10, the XWayland 21.1 standalone release offers X-Video NV12 support via GLAMOR, support for GLAMOR on XWayland to accelerate more RENDER extension formats, the XWayland GLX provider code uses the EGL implementation, Viewport protocol support for upscaling of full-screen applications running at a lower resolution, XWayland now alternates between multiple buffers for all Wayland surfaces, and better support for relative mouse input and keyboard grabs. Those are the main end-user changes to enjoy out of XWayland 21.1.

More details on XWayland 21.1 and source downloads via the release announcement.