Few days ago, The team behind the Alpine Linux distribution announced the launch of Wayback 0.1, the first experimental version of a project designed to run environments desktop based on X11 on the infrastructure of Wayland.
The proposal seeks to facilitate the transition from the classic X.org server to a more modern and lightweight architecture, eliminating the need to maintain an X server independent in the repositories and thus reducing maintenance costs for legacy applications.
Wayback works as a minimalist Wayland composite server, which supports only the essential features for running full-screen X11 sessions through Xwayland. The latter is a DDX component that allows X11 applications to run in Wayland environments.
From tinywl to a potential Xorg replacement
The heart of Wayback is inspired by tinywl, the wlroots library reference composer, but with functionality reduced to a minimum necessary for Xwayland to function independently. The project's ambition is clear: in the future, Wayback could act as a complete replacement for the Xorg executable (/usr/bin/X), maintaining compatibility with exclusively X11 desktop environments, but on a Wayland basis.
In Alpine Linux, The goal is to retain only the essential components of Wayland and Xwayland, implementing the launch of X11 environments directly on them and dispensing with an independent X.org server.
Since its initial announcement, Wayback has evolved significantly. The architecture of the project was reorganized into three main components:
- wayback-compositor, responsible for managing graphic composition
- Xwayback, which provides an Xorg-compatible command-line interface for starting Xwayland alongside the compositor
- wayback-session, which acts as a session manager with an interface similar to startx.
Also a centralized registration system was introduced, A new getopt-inspired option parser and a standardized coding style with clang-format. Additionally, the project migrated from GitHub to the freedesktop.org infrastructure, strengthening its integration with the development community.
Current status and limitations
Although It is now possible to use Wayback in everyday life for simple environments, This is still an alpha version, and there are features that remain unimplemented.It doesn't support multi-monitor setups or power management via DPMS, and many of the classic Xorg options are still in placeholder form. It's also not yet possible to capture the mouse pointer, which is essential for certain video games or security applications like XScreenSaver.
Despite these limitations, the team and several contributors already use it regularly to detect and correct errors. The community is invited to test it, report bugs, and even submit contributions, thus consolidating its development.
Another novelty is that Wayback now has an official logo, directly inspired by the X.org emblem., a visual nod that reinforces its role as heir and technological bridge. Project communication has also been improved thanks to the opening of a Matrix channel linked to its IRC on Libera.Chat, facilitating direct collaboration with developers.
Finally, it should be mentioned that Wayback is not intended to immediately replace Xorg in all scenarios, but it does offer a light alternative, modern and low-maintenance for those who need to continue using exclusively X11 environments. Its modular approach and direct integration with Wayland and Xwayland make it a key element to accelerate Wayland adoption without abandoning support for legacy X11.
For those interested in trying Wayback, it is already packaged for several distributions, including Alpine Linux, Nix, Arch Linux (AUR), Fedora, T2, and ALT Linux, making it easy to install and test in different environments. You can check out the installation details on this page.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that All code is written in C and distributed under the MIT license, This guarantees its openness and adaptability to different scenarios. If you're interested in learning more, you can check out the details. In the following link.