Wayback 0.1 debuts as early Wayland server for X11 diehards

3 months ago 13

Wayback 0.1 is out, the first preliminary release of the new Wayland display server whose announcement we reported a few weeks ago.

"Just enough Wayland to make Xwayland work," reads the new site's handy strapline. It's a good summary – if you know what Xwayland is.

This first, preliminary release arrives less than a month after the project's initial announcement. This means it's very early days yet. This is still new, experimental software, it's quite far from feature-complete, and a whole list of stuff doesn't work yet. Don't get too excited yet. That said, it sounds promising. According to the the announcement:

It continues:

So, treat this with some caution, and don't expect a Miracle*.

As a quick recap, Wayland is still making progress, and the X.org X11 server is in maintenance mode. However, there are quite a few X11-based window managers and desktop environments that don't work with Wayland yet, and many never will. We described about 17 such environments back in 2022. Announced last month, Xlibre is a new fork of the X.org X11 server, but the politics and views of the people behind Xlibre are considered unacceptable by many in the FOSS community.

As a result, the development of Wayback was sped up, leading to this first preview release. It's a Wayland display server that can take the place of an X11 server and presents a full-screen "rootful" session of Xwayland. It enables those who don't want any of the existing Wayland environments to keep their current X11-based environment, but run it without needing a whole X11 server underneath.

Xwayland itself is nothing new, it's a standard part of most Wayland desktops. Xwayland is an X11 server that runs under an existing Wayland compositor, enabling you to run traditional X11 applications under your shiny new Wayland-based environment. But the snag is that it needs an existing compositor to run under – or, in the older terminology, it runs under an existing window manager. That means you can't run an X11 window manager using Xwayland. In other words, Xwayland is no use if you want to use an existing X11 setup, such as Window Maker or the recently revived IceWM or something really legacy like the Common Desktop Environment, CDE.

There's a significant amount of functionality missing from Wayback version 0.1. It can't do DPMS power management yet. So far, it only supports a single screen, although multihead should come in time. Quite a few command line options to the traditional X command don't work yet, and many X functions are "stubbed out" – which means they're there but they don't do anything yet. For instance, "mouse locking," which means constraining the mouse pointer into a single window, which is used in many games.

Not only is it early days for Wayback, but it also remains a Wayland-based tool. Bear both these things in mind and manage your expectations. We have read a great many reports and comments that the network functionality of the X Window System is its single key feature for many users, and Wayback will not deliver that. You could potentially use Waypipe or VNC or RDP or something like that instead, but Wayback is a local display server.

So, a month after the first release of the new Xlibre comes the first release of the response from the Wayland side of the fence. The Reg FOSS desk is watching both with great interest.

This vulture has been using X11-based environments for over 25 years now, and is not personally fond of either KDE Plasma (vastly too cluttered for our tastes), or of GNOME (far too limited and restrictive). All of our preferred environments remain X11-based for now, and moving to Wayland would involve significant functional compromises that we don't want to make. X.org still works fine for everything we want, and if either – or both – of these projects delivers something that will let us continue using our preferred environments in future, then we're interested. ®

*Bootnote: Speaking of a Miracle…

We facetiously linked to the Miracle-WM project, but this was purely a punne or play on words.^† We did mean it: don't expect Miracle-WM – there's no relationship. Miracle-WM is a native Wayland compositor and isn't compatible with Wayback.

Saying that, though, the Miracle-WM tiling compositor for Canonical's Mir display server continues to make good progress. It's up to version 0.62 now, version 0.6 appearing just a couple of weeks ago.

^† Yes, we know it's really spelled "pun." This phrase is a Terry Pratchett reference. If you don't read Pratchett, you should.

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