Weston's goal is to provide a high-quality code base and working examples for using Wayland in desktop environments and embedded solutions,
After eight months of development the release of the stable version was announced composite server weston 11.0, which is developing with technologies that contribute to the emergence of full support for the Wayland protocol in Enlightenment, GNOME, KDE and other user environments.
Wayland consists of a protocol (largely complete) and a reference implementation called Weston. For rendering, Weston can use OpenGL ES or software (the pixman library). Currently customers are limited to OpenGL ES rather than full OpenGL because "libGL uses GLX and all X dependencies." The project is also developing GTK + and Qt versions which render to Wayland instead of X.
The development of Weston is focused on providing a high-quality code base and working examples to use Wayland in desktop environments and embedded solutions.
Main new features of Weston 11.0
In this new release of Weston 11.0 the main change in Weston's version number is due to ABI changes that break backwards compatibility.
For the part of the changes that were made and of those that stand out from Weston 11.0 is the ongoing work on a color management infrastructure which allows color conversion, gamma correction and color profiles. Including the ability to set the ICC profile for the monitor and reflect sRGB colors on it. Support for switching the monitor to HDR mode also appeared, but the formation of HDR content has not yet been implemented.
Another change that stands out in this new version is that added support for the single pixel buffer protocol, which allows the creation of single-pixel buffers that include four 32-bit RGBA values. Using the display protocol, the composite server can scale single pixel buffers to create uniformly colored surfaces of arbitrary size.
Besides it preparations have been made for implementation in one of next support releases for execution simultaneous multiple backends, for example, for output via KMS and RDP.
On the other hand, it is also highlighted that the DRM backend has laid the foundation for future support for multi-GPU configurations, in addition to several improvements to support the RDP backend for remote access to screen content and work has been done. in improving the performance of back-end DRM.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Reworked implementation of weston_buffer.
- The cms-static and cms-colord plugins have been deprecated.
- Removed support for multiple workspaces and desktop-shell scaling.
- Removed support for the wl_shell protocol and replaced it with xdg-shell.
- Removed fbdev backend, should use KMS backend instead.
- The weston-launch, launcher-direct, weston-info and weston-gears components have been removed and you should use the libsea and wayland-info library instead.
- By default, the KMS max-bpc property is set.
- A crash occurs when free memory on the system is exhausted.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
How to install Weston 11.0 on Ubuntu and derivatives?
Well, for those of you interested in being able to install this new version of Weston, they must have Wayland installed on their system.In order to install it, we only have to open a terminal and in it we are going to type the following:
pip3 install --user meson
Done this, now we are going to download the new version of Weston 11.0 with the following command:
wget https://wayland.freedesktop.org/releases/weston-11.0.0.tar.xz
We unzip the content with:
tar -xvf weston-11.0.0.tar.xz
We access the folder created with:
cd weston-11.0.0
And we carry out the compilation and installation with:
meson build/ --prefix=... ninja -C build/ install cd ..
At the end, it is recommended to restart the computer to start with the changes in the new user session.