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

Anna (navi) Figueiredo Gomes (7):
      wayback-session: properly handle XWAYBACK_PATH
      xwayback: remove unused variables
      xwayback: remove unsetenv check
      xwayback: use wl_display_connect_to_fd
      xwayback: unset WAYLAND_SOCKET as well
      xwayback: simplify argument relaying
      xwayback: use posix_spawn over fork+exec

Ariadne Conill (13):
      initial commit
      add wlr_viewporter
      implement session launching
      hackishly probe output geometry
      add LICENSE
      add README
      add code of conduct
      LICENSE: use MIT
      readme: note libera.chat discussion channel
      meson: add xwayback.c back
      fix sys/signal.h deprecation warnings on alpine
      protocol: meson: fix up deprecation warnings
      compositor: use traditional X killswitch combo instead of alt+esc

Consolatis (1):
      xwayback: allow nested startup on wayland

Ferass El Hafidi (29):
      xwayback: add handling of SIGSEGV
      xwayback: check if compositor/Xwayland path exists
      xwayback: ensure that xwayback->first_output is not NULL
      xwayback: run Xwayland with -terminate
      xwayback: prefix "passed descriptor" message
      xwayback: unset WAYLAND_DISPLAY
      xwayback: support setting XWAYLAND_PATH env var to an alternate path to Xwayland binary
      doc/Xwayback.scdoc: mention new XWAYLAND_PATH env var
      xwayback: actually use the XWAYLAND_PATH env var
      README.md: mention some distro packages
      .gitlab: add new issue templates
      doc: use tabs for indentation
      wayback-session: introduce XWAYBACK_PATH env var
      doc/wayback-session.scdoc: document supported environment variables
      xwayback: fix typo in 'Xwayland not found' error message
      xwayback: remove useless calls to strdup
      wayback-session,xwayback: remove useless F_OK
      wayback-session: actually initialise session_cmd
      Xwayback: use getopt_long_only instead of getopt_long
      wayback-session: only check access when the env var is set
      xwayback|wayback-session: print sterror-ified error message on exec failure
      wayback-session: also print sterror-ified message on session exec fail
      wayback-compositor: remove references to request_move/resize
      wayback-session: unset WAYLAND_DISPLAY before running session
      Xwayback: add timeout to `-terminate`
      reimplement option parsing
      Xwayback: do not hand over handled options to Xwayland
      Xwayback|wayback-compositor: replace remaining fprintf's with wayback_log
      Xwayback: add more options

Joaquim Monteiro (3):
      Set up GitHub CI
      meson: Set C standard to C11 with GNU extensions
      meson: Enable compiler warnings

Jules Maselbas (3):
      wayback-compositor: stop at the first handled key
      xwayback: make local symbols static
      xwayback: make env string pointer const

Michal Vanis (2):
      wayback-compositor: remove the viewporter protocol
      xwayback: remove the xwayland fullscreen flag

Neal Gompa (15):
      meson, wayback: Update to indicate code licensed under MIT license
      ci: Add Fedora Rawhide build testing
      meson, xwayback: Detect and use the Xwayland binary found at build time
      Add note of archival
      README: Drop GitHub archival note and update description to match fdo submission
      CI: Port over to GitLab CI leveraging gitlab.freedesktop.org instance runners
      Switch to the FreeDesktop Code of Conduct
      README: Fix formatting for GitLab
      doc: Add Wayback logo SVG
      doc: Update Wayback logo icon
      Add a clang-format definition and reformat codebase with clang-format
      CI: Run clang-format checks
      CI: Set clang-format to run only on merge requests and on the MR diff
      meson: Raise the C standard to C23 and bump minimum version to 1.4.0
      README: Point to the official Fedora Linux package

Sertonix (1):
      build: remove unused variable

axtlos (11):
      wayback-session/xwayback: properly quit with child
      Common: Add wayback logging functions
      Xwayback/wayback-session: Use new logging functions
      common: Use static library for common functions
      common: Respect NO_COLOR envvar for color logging
      common: Properly define includes as dependency
      Xwayback: use write to print error in case of segv
      Xwayback/wayback-compositor: Allow deciding which output to use
      Wayback: Remove uses of BUFSIZ
      Xwayback: Use X style arguments
      Xwayback: Pass unknown arguments to Xwayland

axtloss (23):
      Add installation instructions to README
      Use getopt for argument parsing
      Automatically exit with X11 Desktop/WM
      Set XDG_SESSION_TYPE to x11
      allow vt switching through alt+ctrl+Fn
      Split wayback in xorg like structure
      Add wayback-compositor
      Add xwayback to launch xwayland and wayback-compositor
      Add -displayfd option to Xwayback
      Add Xwayback(1) manpage
      wayback-compositor: Readd VT switching support
      Split wayback in xorg like structure
      Add wayback-session to to launch xwayback and the user session
      Use displayfd to get display in wayback-session
      wayback-session: improve get_xinitrc_path
      Add wayback-session(1) manpage
      Add meson build target for manpages
      wayback-session: Dont set WAYLAND_DISPLAY
      wayback-compositor: Properly bind ctrl+alt+backspace
      meson: Install wayback-compositor to libexec
      Properly concatenate path for wayback compositor
      meson: Allow wlroots-0.18
      xwayback: Allow overwriting wayback-compositor path

dramforever (2):
      wayback-compositor: Use common functions
      common: Add and use {asprintf,strdup}_or_exit

fossdd (2):
      build: install wayback
      build: generate Xwayback.1 manpage