Sway 1.10 has been officially released, marking a substantial update for the dynamic tiling Wayland compositor. This release, announced in November 2023, introduces 237 changes collaborated by 44 contributors, showcasing a collective effort towards enhancing the Sway experience. The update is dependent on the wlroots library version 0.18.0. Users can refer to the comprehensive release notes for wlroots 0.18.0 to better understand its impact on Sway 1.10.

New Features

Sway 1.10 integrates all the enhancements from wlroots 0.18.0, significantly impacting performance and usability:

• Renderer Overhaul: The renderer has been completely rewritten to fully leverage the wlroots scene-graph API, which promises improved performance metrics across the board.
• Resilience Improvements: A new GPU reset recovery feature has been added, aiming to bolster robustness during graphical interruptions.
• Expanded Display Management: A command now allows the use of ICC profiles for outputs, enhancing display color configuration.
• CJK IME Support: In a nod to internationalization, Sway now supports IME popups crucial for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) users.
• Gaming Features: Sway includes tearing-control-v1 support to enable tearing page-flips, improving gaming and dynamic content playback.
• Remote and Network Applications: With the new ext-transient-seat-v1 and ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1 protocols, Sway enhances support for remoting apps, impacting users who prefer applications like wayvnc and those needing detailed information about other toplevels, potentially benefiting taskbars and screen capture utilities.
• User Interface Optimizations: xdg-shell v5 support is also added, featuring popup repositioning and the option to hide maximize/minimize buttons in client-side decorations.

Key Changes

Beyond the new features, Sway 1.10 brings about significant changes in configuration and dependency management to streamline workflow:

• Configuration File Update: The default configuration file now foregoes the dependency on dmenu_run, shifting to more direct commands for volume, brightness, and screenshot functionalities via pactl, brightnessctl, and grim respectively.
• Protocol Updates: As a forward-looking step, Sway now defaults to the standard linux-dmabuf-v1 protocol over the legacy wl_drm, aligning it for upcoming versions of Xwayland and associated components while warning of breakages with older versions.
• Xwayland Integration: The xwayland build-time option is discarded; its support is determined at build-time depending on the wlroots configuration.

Full Changelog

The complete changelog details further technical modifications across Sway's core components, ensuring developers and users have a detailed account of the changes and improvements made.

For further details, enthusiasts, developers, and users can delve into the release notes provided on the Sway GitHub page.