The Labwc project has published version 0.9 of its lightweight, Openbox-inspired Wayland window-stacking compositor. It now builds against wlroots 0.19, which brings access to newer Wayland protocols and internal clean-ups; however, it also forces the project to contend with ecosystem edge cases.
For example, a long-standing ambiguity in the Wayland/GTK interaction model means that, for the moment, GTK menu items cannot be activated with a single press-drag-release gesture. However, the developers chose not to delay the release over this issue, framing it as an industry-wide incompatibility rather than a Labwc-specific bug.
There’s also one other trade-off: VR headset support is temporarily disabled when Labwc is compiled against wlroots 0.19, owing to an upstream bug that should be stamped out once wlroots 0.19.1 lands.
On the features and enhancements side, this release introduces several notable additions:
lab-sensible-terminaljoins the default root-menu, smartly launching whichever terminal emulator is set in the$TERMINALenvironment variable.- A beefed-up
--versionflag now prints feature toggles such as+xwaylandand-rsvg, giving packagers a quick sanity check. - DRM leases are forwarded to XWayland clients, provided XWayland ≥ 21.1.9 is on the system. This is a big win for high-performance, full-screen apps that need direct access to the GPU.
- Titlebars can now pull colors from X11 color names or
#rgbshorthand, and they support vertical gradients plus split-color options. - A new
<theme><dropShadowsOnTiled>switch lets users decide whether tiled windows should cast shadows—handy for those who like a bit of separation between panes.
On the protocol front, Labwc 0.9 adopts ext-data-control, alpha-modifier, xdg-toplevel-icon, drm-syncobj, and ext-image-copy-capture. Support for tablet-tool buttons, scroll emulation via cursor motion, and smarter fractional-scale handling round out the list.
Dozens of fixes land with this release—everything from squashing focus glitches in Zoom and CLion to eliminating nasty compositor crashes triggered by orphaned pop-ups. One subtle but welcome tweak: dragged windows can finally hop between workspaces without first being re-parented.
Lastly, the default key-bindings have been trimmed and retuned. Alacritty is swapped out for lab-sensible-terminal, and several Alt-based shortcuts are deprecated to avoid clashing with common in-application combos. Mouse binds that once leaned on Alt now default to the Super modifier, sidestepping conflicts with CAD tools and games.
For more information about all changes, visit the release’s changelog.
