Polo Debuts As New Wayland Compositor For MATE Desktop
For those fond of the GNOME 2 forked MATE desktop but wanting to take it into the native Wayland world, Polo 1.0 released today as a new compositor option for modern desktop computing with MATE… ⌘ Read more
HyprBSD Provides Wayland-Based Desktop Built Atop FreeBSD, Complete With Steam Gaming
While FreeBSD has been working to improve its desktop and laptop experience, that work isn’t yet shipping in released form for the OS installer and other ongoing efforts. Now there’s a new desktop FreeBSD distribution on the scene with HyprBSD providing a Wayland-based desktop experience and with the Linux binary compatibility layer even an easy route to gaming with Steam… ⌘ Read more
Mir 2.31 Released With Expanded Wayland Protocol Support
Mir 2.31 is now available as the latest feature release for this Canonical/Ubuntu solution for providing C++ libraries to build Wayland-based shells… ⌘ Read more
MPV 0.42 Media Player Brings Wayland Improvements, Improved HDR
MPV as the open-source, cross-platform media player originally based on MPlayer/mplayer2 is finally out with a new release… ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA 620.70.06 Linux Driver Released With Wayland Fixes & Performance Work
Out today is the first NVIDIA Linux driver release in the R620 release branch. This NVIDIA 620.70.06 Linux driver release isn’t too feature heavy but comes with some bug fixes, improved performance of explicit sync on Wayland, and some other refinements… ⌘ Read more
Domicile Desktop Brings Web Technologies To Building Wayland Desktops
Domicile is a new Wayland compositor that leverages Chromium for allowing custom Linux desktops to be built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript… ⌘ Read more
In more frustrating news, I did something to my primary laptop, and now it crawls along like a 2005 Celeron trying to run Windows Vista.
My laptop is nothing too special (a Lenovo powered by an i7-1255U (4+8) @ 4.70 GHz with integrated “Iris Xe” graphics), but I’ve been running Manjaro Linux (with KDE Plasma) on it for the past couple of years, and apart from the odd pamac / pacman / “Add Remove Software” inconsistency (or Plasma widget issue), it’s been running pretty well.
Then, a few days ago, it started bugging about updates, and yesterday it added complaints about an unsupported kernel, so I finally pulled the trigger on it, and boy do I regret it.
I initially kept having issues downloading all of the updates (it was trying to download some kind of non-existent Quake-related library, which I had to remove), and I also had issues getting rid of the unsupported 7.1 kernel (due to some “meta” packages that had been installed), but in the end, I resolved both issues, got the kernel removed and the updates installed, and everything seemed fine after the post-update reboot… for about 10 minutes.
And that’s when the machine just decided to start moving at 1/3 speed: typing, moving the cursor, changing windows - everything started acting like it was 2008.
When I first tried to diagnose it, top showed kwin_wayland eating 50% of the CPU, and plasmashell another 10%, but it wasn’t consistent (they both came and went). I disabled all of the desktop effects, which helped some, as did blanking my plasma config (setting my desktop back to default), but things are still noticeably laggier than they were a few days ago.
Someone online suggested freeing up 25% space total on my root drive (which typically runs 90-95% full), so I’ve been cleaning up (and offloading) as much as I can. If that doesn’t work and I don’t find a solution by the end of the week, I’ll probably have to backup my data, wipe the machine clean, and start fresh. 🙃
X.Org XCB Co-Creator Praises Wayland’s Protocol Design
Open-source developer Jamey Sharp who is a longtime X.Org developer and co-creator of the X protocol C-language Binding (XCB) finally had the need to write a Wayland client and ended up praising its design… ⌘ Read more
Hyprland 0.57 Released With Compiz Inspired Wobbly Windows
For those that want to reminisce over the days long ago of Compiz and Beryl on the Linux desktop, the Hyprland 0.57 Wayland compositor released today and has added Compiz-inspired wobbly windows support… ⌘ Read more
KWin-Type Introduced To Address KDE Wayland Usability Gap For Auto-Typing Text
Open-source developer Jason Donenfeld known for his work on WireGuard announced today the release of kwin-type. KWin-type is a new Wayland-compatible program for auto-typing text from the standard input under the KWin Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more
New Wayland Protocol Proposed For VNC/Remote Software
Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser sent out a merge request today for introducing the new ext-transient-output protocol. With ext-transient-output, it’s intent is for helping remoting software like VNC servers in a Wayland world… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.9 Stabilizes KWin’s Wayland Picture-In-Picture Support
With the wonderful KDE Plasma 6.8 having shipped just more than one week ago, KDE developers are beginning to go heavy on new features for Plasma 6.9… ⌘ Read more
COSMIC Epoch 1.11 Released With Wayland xdg-dialog-v1, Better Multi-GPU Handling
System76 developers just released COSMIC Epoch 1.11 as the newest point release to their Rust-written open-source desktop environment catering to their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.8 Released, Marks 30 Years of the KDE Project
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: The feature-packed and polished Plasma 6.8 KDE desktop is now available. Making this release all the more special is that it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the KDE project. KDE Plasma 6.8 ships many exciting improvements including vRAM usage optimizations, dwell clicker support on Wayland, Wayland comm … ⌘ Read more
AI-Generated Starling Desktop Environment Rolls Out Its Own Office Suite
Starling, the open-source desktop environment written in Swift and with its own Wayland compositor too and written largely via Claude Code, has now rolled out its own AI-generated office suite… ⌘ Read more
GE-Proton 11-9 arrives with improvements for Video Playback, Wayland, Controllers and more
GE-Proton 11-9 (and GE-Proton 11-8 just before it) have been released to bring more improvements for Windows games on SteamOS / Linux.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/ge-proton-11-9-arrives-with-improvements-for-video-playback … ⌘ Read more
Firefox 159 Beta Released With Fix For Tabs On Wayland
With Firefox 158 released, Firefox 159 is now in beta ahead of its official release in two weeks… ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA’s Results Of Conducting Wayland vs. X.Org Latency Testing
In addition to NVIDIA announcing their Display Config Server project at XDC 2026 in Toronto, at this annual developer’s conference they also presented their findings on scientific testing of X.Org vs. Wayland latency… ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.19 released with Wayland Colour Management, Unicode upgrades, DNS query cache
The Wine 11.19 release is now available for this open source Windows compatibility layer, bringing an assortment of new features and fixes.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/wine-11-19-released-with-wayland-colour-management-unicode-upgrades … ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.19 Released With Wayland Color Management For Vulkan, DNS Query Caching
We are nearing the point of the Wine 12.0 stable release coming up in early 2027 while for now the Wine 11.xx bi-weekly development releases continue. Out today is Wine 11.19 with a few new features and plenty of fixes… ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA Developing “Display Config Server” To Improve Linux/Wayland On Display Walls
As an initiative from NVIDIA for improving the Linux ecosystem outside the world of AI, they have been developing Display-Config-Server as a new solution to help enhance the Linux capabilities for complex display walls… ⌘ Read more
Mir 2.30 Released Now With Rust Required, Mir Roadmap Published
Canonical today released Mir 2.30 as the newest release of this Wayland compositor library for building out different shells and other functionality from smart mirrors to other consumer devices… ⌘ Read more
AI-Assisted Starling Desktop Introduces 3D View With “Walkable 3D Waterfront City”
From a few months ago you may recall Starling as the new Linux desktop written with its own Wayland compositor, using the Swift programming language, and written in large part via AI with Claude Code. Out today is Starling 0.5 with this desktop now gaining an optional 3D desktop mode… ⌘ Read more
libinput 1.32 Released With Circular Scrolling Support For Circular Touchpads
Leading Linux input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release today of libinput 1.32 for improving input handling on Wayland and X.Org based environments… ⌘ Read more
Mir/Wayland-Powered Miracle-WM 0.11 Released With New Overview Mode, Window Urgency
Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek rolled out Miracle-WM 0.11 today as an end-of-summer update to this Wayland compositor built atop the Mir library… ⌘ Read more
GE-Proton 11-7 brings more Wine Wayland upgrades, launcher fixes, game fixes and more
GE-Proton 11-7 has arrived and there’s quite a lot of gaming improvements here for SteamOS / Linux fans.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
Mesa 26.3 RADV + RadeonSI Ready With DRM Format Modifiers For Older AMD GPUs
Coming with Linux 7.3 is DRM format modifiers for GFX6 through GFX8 era GPUs covering the original Raddeon HD 7000 (GCN 1.0) graphics cards up through the Polaris and Fiji series. This work by Valve’s Timur Kristóf is necessary for these older GPUs to support Vulkan-based Wayland compositors, better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan or other APis, compositors running on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation, and o … ⌘ Read more
KDE’s KWin Merges Wayland Commit-Timing Protocol Support
Merged today to the latest KDE KWin compositor development code is support for Wayland’s important commit-timing protocol that is useful for video playback as well as for gamers relying on Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync support… ⌘ Read more
XDC 2026 Will Feature Many Interesting Talks: Vulkan Gallium, OpenCL On CUDA & More
The annual X.Org Developer’s Conference “XDC 2026” is happening later this month in Toronto. A great number of interesting talks are planned this year from new Wayland features to OpenCL over CUDA, the possibility of Vulkan Gallium, and a lot of exciting driver developments… ⌘ Read more
Mir 2.29 Released With Additional Wayland Protocols
For those using Canonical’s Mir compositor for building Wayland-based shells, Mir 2.29 is now available with various improvements and new Wayland protocol coverage… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.8 Lands Dwell Clicker Support To Improve Accessibility On Wayland
In preparations for Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-exclusive in abandoning the X11 session, another feature gap compared to X11 has been addressed… ⌘ Read more
GE-Proton 11-6 released with updates for Wayland, PS5 Controllers and more upgrades
The community build of Valve’s compatibility layer GE-Proton 11-6 is out now, bringing major new features and changes to running Windows games SteamOS / Linux.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/ge-proton-11-6-released-with-updates-for-waylan … ⌘ Read more
Wayland Found To Be “Intrinsically Faster Than X11, But Not Necessarily More Efficient”
The PorteuX Linux distribution focused on being a high performance, modular, and minimalist distro took to forking Xfce’s xfwm4 window manager into “xfwm4-gl” for OpenGL compositing support. As part of that they developed a window manager / compositor benchmark for evaluating the performance and efficiency of typical operations. Their results are fascinating… ⌘ Read more
Wayland Found To Be “Intrinsically Faster Than X11, But Not Necessarily More Efficient”
The PorteuX Linux distribution focused on being a high performance, modular, and minimalist distro took to forking Xfce’s xfwm4 window manager into “xfwm4-gl” for OpenGL compositing support. As part of that they developed a window manager / compositor benchmark for evaluating the performance and efficiency of typical operations. Their results are fascinating… ⌘ Read more
KDE Remote Desktop Experience Improving For Closing The X11 vs. Wayland Gap
KDE developer David Edmundson is out today with a blog post around improvements that have been ongoing for the Plasma 6.8 release in improving the KDE remote desktop experience. As part of ensuring a good Wayland experience and hitting all the needs fulfilled by X11, Plasma 6.8 is seeing improvements for its remote desktop functionality… ⌘ Read more
↳
In-reply-to
»
There is this extremely annoying issue with my website:
⤋ Read More
FTR, also happens with Openbox on X11 and with labwc on Wayland, so this isn’t related to my custom X11 window manager.
The author of the Xfce Wayland compositor on LLMs:
https://www.spurint.org/journal/2026/07/llms-and-xfwl4
He openly admits that he’s totally aware of the issues. But he simply doesn’t give a fuck.
This is (part of) why this whole AI/LLM topic makes me so sad and angry: Many people in tech are such a disappointment. You’re smart and intelligent, but you don’t give a fuck about anything. “It’s just a tool.”
Wine 11.15 brings improvements for Wayland, more format conversions in WindowsCodecs
The Wine 11.15 development release is out for the Windows to Linux compatibility layer to help run more applications and games.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/wine-11-15-brings-improvements-for-wayland-more-format-conversions-in-windowscod … ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.15 Released With Wayland Fixes, Fix For A 20 Year Old MSXML3 Bug
Making its debut this Saturday rather than the usual bi-weekly Friday release regiment, Wine 11.15 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux… ⌘ Read more
Denial WM: New Wayland Compositor With Flutter Directly Embedded
The newest Wayland compositor to talk about and discuss is Denial, a Wayland compositor focused on optimal Arch Linux integration and that embeds the Flutter engine directly into the codebase. Denial makes use of the Rust programming language and leverages Smithay to help in the compositor responsibilities… ⌘ Read more
KGamma2 Makes For Easy Gamma Adjustments On KDE Plasma With Wayland
KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland… ⌘ Read more
GNOME Mutter 51 Beta Released With Wayland Background Blur, Improved Frame Scheduling
Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier… ⌘ Read more
Starling: A New Linux Desktop Written In Swift, Own Wayland Compositor & Written With AI
There’s yet another new open-source desktop option for Linux users in the era of new open-source projects largely written via AI/LLMs. Starling is this new project largely written via Claude and using the Swift programming language for the desktop while having its own Wayland compositor implemented in C. It also includes a built-in X11 server for handling X11 clients… ⌘ Read more
libx11-compat Is Working To Implement Xlib Atop SDL For Wayland, macOS, Android
For helping to keep X11 clients running in a modern Linux desktop world with Wayland or even for running on macOS or Android, there is now yet-another option being developed with libx11-compat. The libx11-compat project is working to re-implement the Xlib client library atop SDL2/SDL3 interfaces for allow broad underlying platform coverage… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.7 vs. GNOME Shell 50.3 vs. Xfce 4.20 On CachyOS With NVIDIA Graphics
Earlier this month I provided a look at the KDE Plasma 6.7 Wayland vs. X11 session performance for graphics/gaming on CachyOS using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics. Since then Phoronix readers – including some premium supporters – requested seeing some additional desktops tested with the latest CachyOS packages. So here we are now with seeing how KDE Plasma 6.7 compared to the Wayland-only GNOME Shell 50.3 desktop as well as th … ⌘ Read more
Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4 brings SDL3, and prefers Wayland on Linux
Minecraft is set for another big update with a fresh Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4 ready for testing, and overall it’s quite a big technical upgrade.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
GNOME Lands ext-background-effect-v1 Support For Background Blur Effect
Added to the Wayland Protocols repository back in May of 2025 was the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol for background blur that had been under discussion since early 2024. The initial focus is on being able to apply a blur effect on a window’s background or otherwise a specified screen region. GNOME 51 has now merged support for ext-background-effect-v1 with the latest Mutter code… ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.12 Released With Wayland Fractional Scaling & Other Wayland Enhancements
Wine 11.12 fell off the bi-weekly release rhythm with not making it out last Friday, but it managed to ship today. Wine 11.12 brings fractional scaling support to its Wayland driver and various other enhancements… ⌘ Read more
Vim Patches Yielding Faster GTK3 Wayland Performance: “Major Milestone”
For those using Vim with its GTK3 toolkit interface on Wayland, it soon should be delivering much better performance with pending patches… ⌘ Read more
Nourish: A New Wayland Compositor Powered By Vulkan With Infinite Scrolling/Panning
The newest Wayland compositor on the block is Nourish, it’s a Vulkan-powered and its unique selling point is offering “infinite” zooming and panning to in effect provide an infinite workspace… ⌘ Read more