On February 17, 2016, Bryce Harrington proudly informed the GNU/Linux community about the official release and immediate availability for download of the final bits of the next-generation Wayland 1.10 display server.
Almost daily we encounter open-source software projects, such as those from the GNOME Stack, showing their love for the Wayland display server, and there are a handful of GNU/Linux distributions that promise to switch to Wayland by default soon.
But for now, Wayland remains an experimental project for numerous OS vendors and users alike, just like the Btrfs file system, and it might take a couple of years for these groundbreaking technologies to reach mainstream adoption.
Wayland 1.10 appears to be a big release, and according to the announcement, it implements new functionality like drag-and-drop (DND) actions, diagonal scrolling support, precise track of wheel click counts, and termination of scroll sequences.
Wayland 1.11 release schedule announced
Besides the cool new features listed above, Wayland 1.10 also ships with new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for fetching and configuring the socket file descriptor, better rendering of surfaces for apps, and shared memory buffers improvements.
wl_seat objects can now be deleted thanks to the implementation of provisions, which proves to be quite useful for multi-seat compositors, client-side protocol objects can now get specific version numbers, and there are now many clarifications to various APIs and protocols.
"This release introduces the enum and bitfield attributes, which allow protocol designers to refer to the specific enum that is expected in an argument," said Bryce Harrington. "Enums can also be specified as bitfields, as opposed to just ordinary numerical sequences."
The development of the Wayland display servers continues, and the release schedule for the 1.11 milestone has been published, suggesting a final release at the end of May 2016. The Alpha, Beta, and RC (Release Candidate) builds will be offered to public testers during the entire month of May.
