Wayback 0.1 Released

We are pleased to announce Wayback’s first preview release, version 0.1, just released!

Wayback is an X11 compatibility layer that allows for running full X11-only desktop environments using Wayland. It is essentially an X11 server backed by Wayland, leveraging wlroots and Xwayland. Our goal is for Wayback to eventually be a completely drop-in replacement to the Xorg binary, thus reducing maintenance burden for distro maintainers.

Ever since Wayback was announced on June 28, we have been making lots of progress to get it as stable and functional as possible, and while this is a preview release it is already daily-driveable by users with simple requirements, as long as they don’t mind bugs.

You can grab this new release from the git repository or wait for your distribution to pick it up!

Status

While we hope they aren’t too many bugs, this is still considered alpha-quality software and there are still features that are, as of now, unimplemented or work-in-progress. To set expectations:

• There is no multi-monitor support at the moment (#8)
• DPMS controlling is not yet supported (#55)
• Many Xorg options are currently stubs (#14, #51)
• Some other things don’t work, e.g. mouse locking (very useful in first-person shooters and used by XScreenSaver)

That being said, some of us are already daily-driving it to find bugs and fix them as they appear. We highly encourage testing Wayback and reporting any bugs you encounter, and we also welcome merge requests!

Progress since June 28

Since the initial announcement a lot of progress has been made!

• We moved from kaniini’s GitHub repo to a freedesktop.org GitLab group. (Thanks Conan_Kudo, mupuf, and the freedesktop.org crew!): !40
• We now also have a Matrix bridge (#wayback:catircservices.org) to our IRC channel at Libera.Chat (Thanks whitequark!)
• Split wayback into an X.org-like structure (Thanks axtlos!): !27 and !28
  • wayback-compositor is the actual Wayland compositor
  • Xwayback provides an Xorg-compatible command line interface for launching Xwayland and wayback-compositor
  • wayback-session provides a startx-compatible interface (note it is a temporary measure, eventually we will make use of stock xinit for that)
• Introduced a more central logging mechanism (Thanks axtlos!): !46
• We now have a proper clang-format and an established coding style (Thanks Conan_Kudo!)
• Wayback got packaged in a number of distributions, including Alpine Linux, Nix, Arch Linux (AUR), Fedora, and many others!
• A new option parser, similar to getopt, has been implemented. This is necessary because Xorg supports options e.g. +opt that are not handled by getopt (Thanks funderscore!): !72
• A number of bugs have been fixed, and the overall code has been cleaned up. (Thanks axtlos, Conan_Kudo, Consolatis, dramforever, funderscore, jmaselbas, kaniini, navi, fossdd, MonterraByte, Sertonix!)

Logo and website

Some other exciting news: Wayback now finally has a logo! It is heavily inspired by the X.org logo:

Alongside it, we also have a brand new website! It is powered by Hugo.

Thanks jmaselbas, whitequark, funderscore!

Remaining work

Many thanks to everybody who got involved in this first release.

Thanks to the thriving community we keep making lots of progress towards our goal. If you are new to the project and would like to participate, hop in the #wayback IRC channel on Libera.Chat (#wayback:catircservices.org on Matrix) to get started!

There is still a lot to be done before a stable release, so any and all help is welcome, no matter how small.

Git shortlog