Wayback 0.3 released!

We are pleased to announce the third Wayback preview release, version 0.3, released, and just a few days before 2026!

As always, grab it from the GitLab releases page or wait for your distribution to pick it up!

Status

As usual, this remains an alpha-quality release. Read our previous announcement for more details.

Please still report bugs and features, that helps the project a lot and gets us closer to our goal!

X.Org Developer’s Conference 2025

Wayback was presented at the X.Org Developer’s Conference 2025 by kaniini. In it she talked about the current progress of the project, the overall roadmap and showcased it running twm!

If you didn’t watch it, or would like to rewatch, it has been recorded and is made available by the XDC 2025 folks on YouTube, and the slides are also available for download.

Progress since 0.2

Since 0.2, Wayback has been made available on various popular Linux distros' stable repositories, some bugs have been fixed and a few improvements have been made!

Wayback has been moved from Alpine Linux’s testing repository to community. This means Wayback is now part of official Alpine Linux stable releases. (Thanks fossdd!)
Similarly, Wayback is now also available on Fedora 42 and 43! (Thanks Conan_Kudo!)
Update our manual pages to reflect current status. (Thanks funderscore!)
Some typo fixes and other minor fixes. (Thanks dramforever, funderscore!)
Overhaul of our custom command line option parser to handle more X.org options (such as vtXX) and clearly show why some options are stubbed. Also use it in wayback-session. (Thanks funderscore!)

Future work

Many thanks to everybody who got involved in this release.

kaniini has been looking into moving away from Xwayland’s rootful mode to rootless. This would allow us to properly implement multi-monitor support and other perks, but is still early in the making. If you would like to help, please let us know!

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

Ferass El Hafidi (8):
      common/optparse.c: fix option operand handling
      wayback-session: start making use of optparse
      Xwayback|wayback-session: correct capitalisation of X.Org
      doc: update manual pages
      wayback-session: fix typo
      common/optparse: add support for "opt[num]"-style args
      common/optparse: show description as reason for stubbing
      Xwayback: stub vtXX and -novtswitch

Neal Gompa (1):
      Bump to version 0.3

dramforever (1):
      Xwayback: Close our duplicate of Xwayland socket

fossdd (1):
      README: Point to Alpine's `community` package