wayback

Wayback is a X11 compatibility layer which allows for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components. It is essentially a stub compositor which provides just enough Wayland capabilities to host a rootful Xwayland server.

It is intended to eventually replace the classic X.Org server, thus reducing maintenance burden of X11 applications, but a lot of work needs to be done first.

Wayback is an experimental state: expect breaking changes, and lots of bugs. Please submit pull requests fixing bugs instead of bug reports if you are able.

Installation

Dependencies:

• C compiler supporting the C23 standard (e.g. gcc >= 14 or clang >= 18)
• meson >= 1.4.0
• wayland (wayland-server, wayland-client, wayland-cursor, wayland-egl)
• wayland-protocol >=1.14
• xkbcommon
• wlroots-0.19
• xwayland >= 24.1

Building:

meson setup _build
cd _build
meson compile

Installing:

meson install

Distribution packages

While Wayback is still alpha-quality software as of now there are packages in various popular distributions maintained by folks in the Wayback community.

NOTE: These packages are NOT supported by Wayback developers, and as Wayback development continues they may become out of date. Wayback is still alpha-quality software and development is rapidly moving, so before reporting any issues we ask you to replicate them on the git main branch to make sure they are still applicable to the latest code.

• Alpine Linux: wayback (in community repo)
• ALT Linux: wayback
• Arch Linux: wayback-x11-git in the AUR
• Fedora Linux: wayback
• Gentoo GURU: gui-wm/wayback
• Nixpkgs: wayback-x11
• T2 SDE: wayback

Discussion

• Matrix: #wayback:catircservices.org
• IRC: irc.libera.chat #wayback

Code of Conduct

As a project hosted on freedesktop.org, Wayback follows its Code of Conduct, based on the Contributor Covenant.

Please conduct yourself in a respectful and civilized manner when using the above venues.