These days, important news came from the camp of one of the new and most promising window tiling managers, Hyprland. It has officially completed its transition off of wlroots, signaling the end of a meticulous three-month process involving over 1,000 contributor comments.
For those not aware, Hyprland is a Wayland compositor, initially built using wlroots, a foundational library designed to facilitate the creation of Wayland compositors by providing a comprehensive toolkit of backend implementations, such as handling input devices or managing graphics outputs.
According to Hyprland’s lead dev, the move to independence was detailed in two phases. The first one involved rewriting all protocol implementations, completed. The second and final phase focused on rewriting the backend implementation, covering the low-level backend operations like KMS, DRM, and libinput handling.
With the transition, Hyprland has shifted all protocol implementations to an in-house model, utilizing C++ to reduce memory issues and bugs previously encountered with wlroots potentially.
Additionally, a new library named “aquamarine” has been introduced. Unlike wlroots, aquamarine is not meant to be a direct competitor. Still, it serves as a small-scale abstraction layer for backend functions, facilitating applications’ smooth running on both Wayland compositors and DRM sessions.
Users currently relying on Hyprland have nothing to worry about with this transition, which is largely seamless. The compositor continues to support all wlroots-based applications, and the user-facing changes are minimal, primarily involving updates to configuration options and environment variables detailed in the Hyprland wiki.
These changes will appear in the upcoming 0.42 release of Hyprland. The git branch is available for immediate access for those eager to test these updates.
For more information, refer to the project’s announcement.
