Wayland Protocols 1.48 Released With XDG Session Management
Wayland Protocols 1.48 is out today with the long-awaited XDG Session Management protocol in tow as well as several new experimental protocols… ⌘ Read more

AerynOS 2026.03 Brings GNOME 50, Other Wayland Compositor Updates
AerynOS 2026.03 is now available as the newest release of this from-scratch Linux distribution originally known as Serpent OS. With this month’s update comes GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6.3, and various Wayland compositor updates alongside other software improvements… ⌘ Read more

xx-fractional-scale-v2 Aims To Improve Wayland Fractional Scaling
A merge request for Wayland Protocols was opened today for introducing “xx-fractional-scale-v2” as an experimental protocol to address current shortcomings with current Wayland fractional scaling. There is also a KDE KWin compositor merge request already out for review that implements this xx-fractional-scale-v2 protocol… ⌘ Read more

wlroots 0.20 Released,Sway 1.12-rc1 Available For Testing With Color Management
Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the “heavy lifting” of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Delivers An Impressive Edge For Radeon Graphics Over GNOME 50 On Ubuntu 26.04
In testing thus far on Ubuntu 26.04, the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop with the Wayland session is working pretty darn well and delivering a performance edge across many games/graphics workloads compared to the default GNOME 50 desktop. At least as far as AMD Radeon graphics are concerned, Plasma 6.6 is in quite impressive shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release. ⌘ Read more

Krita 6.0 Released With Qt6 Port & Better Wayland Support
Krita 6.0 debuted today as the Qt6 port of this digital painting program aligned with KDE/Qt development. Krita 6.0 also brings improved Wayland support while Krita 5.3 is being simultaneously released for running on the mature Qt5 toolkit… ⌘ Read more

Electron’s Investment Into Good Wayland Support
For years Electron apps were notorious for continuing to depend upon X11/XWayland and not jive well with the modern Wayland experience on modern Linux desktops. But for the past several months, Wayland has been well supported out-of-the-box on upstream Electron. An Electron blog post this week outlined the technical work done for achieving good Wayland support… ⌘ Read more

SteamOS 3.8 Preview Preps For Steam Machine, KDE Plasma Desktop With Wayland By Default
In addition to last night’s Steam client beta with Steam Runtime container support for the client and that SteamRT3 client now a 64-bit build, Valve also released a big preview update to the forthcoming SteamOS 3.8. The SteamOS 3.8 preview release brings initial support for Steam Machine hardware, various handheld gaming device support improvements, various other Steam Deck updates, improved compatibility with newer Intel and AMD p … ⌘ Read more

Wayland 1.25 Released With Color Management Now Fully Documented
Simon Ser just released Wayland 1.25… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Handheld Edition Switches To Wayland, CachyOS Installer Drops Bcachefs
The March 2026 ISO refresh of the Arch Linux powered CachyOS distribution is now available for new installations and upgrading from existing CachyOS installs… ⌘ Read more

Budgie 10.10.2 Brings Improved Labwc Wayland Compositor Integration
Out today is Budgie 10.10.2 as the latest minor update to this open-source desktop environment that began as part of the Solus Linux project… ⌘ Read more

Wayland 1.25 RC1 Released With Improved Documentation, Minor Changes
Simon Ser announced the release today of Wayland 1.25 RC1 (Wayland v1.24.91) in working toward this next stable release… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Ready With Its Wayland-Compatible Cinnamon Screensaver
Linux Mint developers recently outlined their work on developing a new Wayland-compatible screensaver for use with their Cinnamon desktop environment. Linux Mint developers announced today that their new screensaver solution is ready for use… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter 50.rc Released With Better NVIDIA Performance, SDR-Native & Better HDR
There is two weeks to go until the GNOME 50 stable release while out today is the release candidate of Mutter 50. This Mutter 50.rc release brings some exciting last-minute enhancements to this Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

AerynOS 2026.02 Brings More Wayland Compositor Options, Other Improvements
AerynOS 2026.02 was released for closing out February as the newest alpha release for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. In AerynOS 2026.02 are many package updates plus continued work on the tooling and other innovations around this Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Hyprland 0.54 Released As A “Massive” Update To This Wayland Compositor
Hyprland 0.54 was released today as what’s described as a “a massive update with no understatement” to this Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

RBOS 2026-02-22 As Latest Linux Live ISO To Showcase Wayland
While these days nearly every major desktop Linux distribution is using Wayland or at least making it available, a decade ago before reaching that maturity one of the options for showing off the potential of Wayland was the oddly-named RebeccaBlack OS. With “RBOS” it shipped the very latest Wayland components and different desktop and toolkit options to easily try out Wayland-based environments from a live Linux environment. Released overnight was a surprise upd … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 50 Lands Updated Wayland Color Management v2 Support
Following GNOME 50’s Mutter merging sdr-native color mode support for wide color gamut displays this week, another late addition to Mutter has now been merged ahead of next month’s GNOME 50 stable release… ⌘ Read more

GhostBSD To Use XLibre Server, MATE vs. Gershwin Desktop Decision In Future
GhostBSD lead developer Eric Turgeon published an update regarding X.Org Server vs. XLibre vs. Wayland planning for the GhostBSD distribution moving forward as well as some future uncertainties to this desktop-focused, FreeBSD-derived OS… ⌘ Read more

Lutris 0.5.20 Linux Game Manager Brings New Features, Wine Wayland Option
For fans of Lutris as the open-source desktop client for installing and playing many games on Linux, Lutris 0.5.20 is out today with new features that further enhance the integration with different emulators and compatibility layers… ⌘ Read more

wlroots 0.20 Nears Release With New Protocols, Enhanced Vulkan Renderer
Version 0.20 of the popular wlroots Wayland support library is nearing its official release. Over the past week were two release candidates for wlroots 0.20 were published for this library used by Sway, Wayfire, Cage, Gamescope, and numerous other Wayland compositors… ⌘ Read more

Vim 9.2 Released With Experimental Wayland Support, Better HiDPI Display Support
Vim 9.2 is out today as the newest feature release for this robust and comprehensive text editor. This Valentine’s Day release for Vim lovers brings experimental Wayland support, XDG Base Directory specification support, modernized defaults for HiDPI displays, new completion features, and an improved diff mode… ⌘ Read more

Libinput 1.31 Released With Configurable Timeouts, Fast 3-Finger Swipes
Red Hat’s leading input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release overnight of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by the Linux desktop on both X.Org and Wayland desktop sessions… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Developing New Wayland-Compatible Screensaver
The Linux Mint developers have been hard at work continuing to develop new features following their recent Mint 22.3 release. There is continued enhancements around keyboard support, a new administration tool for users, and there are also considerations being made around moving to a longer development cycle between Linux Mint releases… ⌘ Read more

VRR Improvements Merged To GNOME 50 For Lower Latency, Wayland Commit Timing
While just missing out on the recent Mutter 50 beta release, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of next month’s GNOME 50 desktop release are some improvements to the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support… ⌘ Read more

Krita 6.0 Beta Released - Using Qt6 & Wayland Color Management Support
The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5… ⌘ Read more

libinput 1.31 Bringing Support For Fast Three-Finger Swipes
Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by both modern X.Org Server and Wayland desktop environments… ⌘ Read more

Phosh Mobile Phone UI Making Progress On GTK4 Port
Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon… ⌘ Read more

TigerVNC 1.16 Released With “w0vncserver” For Sharing Wayland Desktop Sessions
TigerVNC 1.16 is out today for this high performance, multi-platform VNC server and client implementation. Most notable with TigerVNC 1.16 is “w0vncserver” as a new server for sharing Wayland desktops… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing Merged To Mesa 26.1 For X11 & Wayland
The Vulkan EXT_present_timing was in development for years to help avoid game stuttering and released this past November with Vulkan 1.4.335. This significant extension as of today has been wired up in Mesa 26.1-devel for the key Vulkan drivers and working on both X11 and Wayland… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Starts 2026 By Switching To Plasma Login Manager & Live ISO Using Wayland
The Arch Linux powered CachyOS distribution is out with its first new ISO release of 2026. This Linux distribution continues to be quite popular with Linux gamers, enthusiasts craving peak performance, and others for wanting to enjoy a polished Arch Linux desktop experience… ⌘ Read more

T2/Linux Brings a Flagship KDE Plasma Linux Desktop to RISC-V and ARM64
After “a decade of deep focus on embedded and server systems,” T2 SDE Linux “is back to the Desktop,” according to its web site, calling the new “T2 Desktop” flavour “ready for everyday home and office use!”

Built on the latest KDE Plasma, systemd, and Wayland, the new T2 Desktop flavour delivers a modern, clean, and performant exp … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Aims To Deliver Better NVIDIA Wayland Performance Atop GNOME
If all goes well the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release will further enhance the NVIDIA graphics performance under its default GNOME Wayland session. The improvements might be upstreamed to GNOME 50 in time but otherwise it’s looking like Ubuntu 26.04 will carry its own patch(es) for improving the NVIDIA Wayland performance… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha Released With X11 Backend Removed
In preparing for the GNOME 50 Alpha release, the “50.alpha” tags just occurred for the Mutter compositor and GNOME Shell. Most notable with GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha is the X11 back-end indeed being removed to focus exclusively on the Wayland session… ⌘ Read more

Okay, I had heard of “River” before but I was not aware of this:

https://codeberg.org/river/river

River defers all window management policy to a separate window manager implementing the river-window-management-v1 protocol. This includes window position/size, pointer/keyboard bindings, focus management, window decorations, desktop shell graphics, and more.

This sounds promising and it follows the old X11 model. River does all the nasty Wayland work and I can make just the WM? 🤔🤯

Budgie 10.10 Released: Officially Migrated From X11 To Wayland
The Budgie 10.10 desktop has been officially released in marking the open-source project’s transition from X11 to Wayland… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not super comfortable, that’s right.

But these mouse events come with a caveat anyway:

ncurses uses the XM terminfo entry to enable mouse events, but it looks like this entry does not enable motion events for most terminal emulators. Reporting motion events is supported by, say, XTerm, xiate, st, or urxvt, it just isn’t activated by XM. This makes all this dragging stuff useless.

For the moment, I edited the terminfo entry for my terminal to include motion events. That can’t be a proper solution. I’m not sure yet if I’m supposed to send the appropriate sequence manually …

And the terminfo entries for tmux or screen don’t include XM at all. tmux itself supports the mouse, but I’m not sure yet how to make it pass on the events to the programs running inside of it (maybe that’s just not supported).

To make things worse, on the Linux VT (outside of X11 or Wayland), the whole thing works differently: You have to use good old gpm to get mouse events (gpm has been around forever, I already used this on SuSE Linux). ncurses does support this, but this is a build flag and Arch Linux doesn’t set this flag. So, at the moment, I’m running a custom build of ncurses as a quick hack. 😅 And this doesn’t report motion events either! Just clicks. (I don’t know if gpm itself can report motion events, I never used the library directly.)

tl;dr: The whole thing will probably be “keyboard first” and then the mouse stuff is a gimmick on top. As much as I’d like to, this isn’t going to be like TUI applications on DOS. I’ll use “Windows” for popups or a multi-window view (with the “WindowManager” being a tiny little tiling WM).

TrixiePup64 2601 Released For Debian 13 Powered Puppy Linux In Wayland & X11 Flavors
For those with fond memories of Puppy Linux as a very lightweight Linux distribution, released last month was a new TrixiePup64 for continuing the Puppy Linux spirit atop Debian. The new TrixiePup64 is based on Debian 13 components while shipping in both X11 and Wayland flavors. Out now is TrixiePup64 2601 as the latest iteration of this lightweight Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Valve’s Linux Efforts, Kernel Improvements & KDE Plasma Wayland Advancements Topped 2025
After looking yesterday at the most viewed Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks of 2025, today’s look is at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the past year. There were 3,286 original news articles on Phoronix during 2025 written by your’s truly, here’s a look back at what excited readers the most over these past twelve months… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Continued At The Forefront Of Upstream Linux Innovations In 2025
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel is “reliving some of the best moments for Fedora Linux in 2025” by highlighting the year’s most popular news around the distro. Throughout 2025, Fedora continued to lead upstream Linux innovation with bold changes like Wayland-only GNOME, newer kernels, architecture cleanups, and experimental features – … ⌘ Read more

Hyprland 0.53 Released With New Launcher For Crash Recovery & Safe Mode, New Welcome App
Hyprland 0.53 was released today as the last feature update to this Wayland compositor for 2025… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma’s Wayland Transition “Nears Completion” In Ending Out 2025
In addition to today’s blog post calling out the need for others to takeover the This Week In Plasma series, KDE developer Nate Graham also published another blog post to highlight the successes of the Plasma desktop over 2025. In particular, the KDE Plasma Wayland transition “nears completion” as it works to become Wayland-only in early 2027… ⌘ Read more

Fedora Continued At The Forefront Of Upstream Linux Innovations In 2025
Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world… ⌘ Read more

SDL Fixes Support For More Than Five Mouse Buttons For Gaming On Wayland
The Simple DirectMedia Library that is widely-used by many cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime now has better support for handling more mouse button events under Wayland… ⌘ Read more

QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop Brings QNX 8.0 To A Wayland + Xfce Desktop
Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cross-compilation to target QNX can be avoided… ⌘ Read more

Nova Driver Progress & Other NVIDIA Linux News From 2025
This year there was a lot of going on in the NVIDIA Linux world from their official driver stack seeing better Wayland support to a lot on the open-source scene from NVIDIA engineers contributing a lot directly to the Rust-based Nova open-source driver that continues taking shape, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver becoming more performant and capable, and a lot of other happenings. Here is a look back at the most popular NVIDIA content of 2025 on Phoronix… ⌘ Read more

Wayback 0.3 Released For Advancing This X11 Compatibility Layer
One of the interesting open-source projects to come about this year was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer using Wayland. Wayback could be used by default on Alpine Linux next year among other distributions. For ending out 2025 development, Wayback 0.3 is now available… ⌘ Read more

Elementary OS 8.1 Switches Over To Wayland Session By Default
Thirteen months after the release of Elementary OS 8.0, Elementary OS 8.1 is now available for this Ubuntu 24.04 LTS based Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use and usability. With Elementary OS 8.1 they have transitioned to using the Wayland session by default… ⌘ Read more

Weston 15.0 Alpha Released With New Protocols, Experimental Vulkan Renderer
After being delayed by three months to allow additional time for new features to land, Weston 15.0 Alpha 1 is out today as a big feature release for this reference Wayland compositor… ⌘ Read more

MPV 0.41 Released With Wayland Improvements, Vulkan Hardware Decoding Preferred
MPV 0.41 is out today as the newest feature release for this MPlayer/mplayer2-derived open-source video player. With MPV 0.41 there is a big focus on improving Wayland support as well as now preferring Vulkan Video acceleration over alternative video decode APIs… ⌘ Read more