Hi! This status update comes a bit late, because I was on leave, biking in the south of France for a few days.

This month I’ve released mako 1.6, to try to make up for the long delay for the last release. mako 1.6 brings quality-of-life improvements: modes allow changing the configuration at runtime (and setting up e.g. a “Do Not Disturb” mode), synchronous hints for easy usage in shell scripts, and the combo of the new “exec” and “on-notify” bindings enable things like notification sound alerts. These new features can be combined together to implement more creative features, let me know if you find other good combos!

Continuing in the new release department, libliftoff 0.1.0 is finally out. It’s been maturing for about 2 years now and it’s used by default in gamescope. The next step will be integrating it in wlroots.

I’ve been focused on wlroots bugfixes and stabilizing the recent renderer and backend refactoring. wlroots 0.14.1 (also released this month) fixes a handful of regressions. The huge renderer v6 internal refactoring is coming to an end with the last piece of the puzzle almost ready.

In the wider Wayland ecosystem scene, I’ve spent some time reviewing the numerous DRM leasing patches across wayland-protocols, Vulkan, Mesa, wlroots, Xwayland and Monado. This work is necessary to complete support for Virtual Reality headsets on Wayland. The Vulkan and Mesa bits have been merged, and the wayland-protocols, wlroots and Xwayland patches are in good shape.

I’ve mentored Joshua Ashton and tricked him into getting into Wayland protocol development. We’ve been working on a surface-suspension protocol to allow off-screen surfaces to consume less resources, and at the same time fix buggy Vulkan games. More work with Khronos will be required to move this forward.

The New Project Of The Month is gh2srht, a small utility to migrate GitHub issues to SourceHut. I’ve used it to migrate the kanshi issues. I’ll be trying to move more of my projects off of GitHub in the future, and use open-source platforms such as SourceHut and FreeDesktop.Org’s GitLab instance.

That’s all for this month, see you in August!