XWayland Adds Support For Touchpad Gestures

XWayland is increasingly great shape especially when it comes to fulfilling the needs of gamers with simply running games lacking native Wayland support with great speed. But when it comes to other use-cases there are occasionally gaps and areas not yet fulfilled by XWayland versus the conventional X.Org Server. One of the latest examples of a feature now correctly wired up is touchpad gesture handling.

Should you be a fan of touchpad gestures, they should now be working under XWayland.

Developer Povilas Kanapickas implemented support for touchpad gestures within the XWayland code that is now in the xserver Git tree. Povilas noted, "The implementation is relatively straightforward because both wayland and Xorg use libinput semantics for touchpad gestures."

The less than three hundred lines of code handle touchpad gestures in going from X Input over to using Wayland's pointer-gestures-unstable-v1 protocol for usage atop supported Wayland compositors.

This support in turn should be part of the first XWayland standalone update of 2022.

Also hitting XServer Git this week was a patch around EGLStream handling preference for benefiting NVIDIA Linux users. This should improve the behavior of those using the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack on the latest 495 series where GBM support was added but where the rest of the components are not new enough to provide a nicely working NVIDIA GBM compositing experience, in which case it will now gracefully use EGLStreams. There have also been a few XWayland fixes to recently land with this being one of the few areas (along with GLAMOR and xf86-video-modesetting) still routinely seeing active development in the X.Org Server source tree.