Wayfire just dropped version 0.11. The modular Wayland compositor, long inspired by Compiz effects and built on wlroots, edges nearer to its 1.0 milestone. Developers positioned this release as likely the final one before that big step. And the changes run deep.
Released on July 24, 2026, according to the project’s official announcement, the update focuses on rendering improvements, better support for high-resolution displays and color accuracy. It adds protocol implementations that modern applications expect. Phoronix covered the news hours later, noting the volume of fixes and new features in its report.
One standout area involves fractional scaling. Previous versions represented most logical geometry with integer coordinates. That approach worked at whole-number scales. Fractional values created subpixel issues. Surfaces ended up one pixel too large. Filtering increased unnecessarily. Decorations misaligned.
Wayfire 0.11 shifts geometry handling to floating-point numbers almost entirely. Only at the final rendering stage do these convert to integers aligned with the framebuffer. The result? Crisp text at fractional scales for many apps. GTK4. Qt. Firefox. Chrome. They all benefit. Yet the change requires clipping or extending surfaces sometimes. So the team gated it behind a config option.
Set use_native_buffer_size = true under the workarounds section. That activates it. XWayland users gain HiDPI support too. These legacy apps never embraced standard Wayland scaling. Now Wayfire renders them at native physical resolution. Text sharpens. Users may tweak X11 DPI or per-app fonts. Enable with force_xwayland_scaling = true. Combine both options. Crisp output follows across resolutions and scales. The project blog details the pull requests behind these shifts.
Color management received equal attention. Per-output ICC profiles. Per-surface handling. HDR rendering. All arrived. Load a profile simply. Point to the file in the output section of your config. icc_profile = /path/to/profile.icc. HDR works on capable displays. Set hdr = true and pick a bit depth. Ten bits for many modern panels.
But HDR demands support from renderer, driver, connector and screen. Vulkan renderer handles the full color-managed path today. The feature stays off by default. These additions mark real progress for users with wide-gamut or high-dynamic-range monitors. The official release notes highlight how this builds on earlier work.
Vulkan renderer improvements extend further. Version 0.10 introduced Vulkan and Pixman backends. Now effects catch up. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional view transformations. Those power plugins like Wrot and Switcher. Wobbly windows too. All work under Vulkan. Still experimental. Build with a specific Meson flag. -Dvulkan_effects=true. It pulls in the wlroots-vkfx dependency and needs glslang. Not every plugin has a Vulkan path yet. The direction looks clear though. Renderer-independent effects come closer.
Plugin management gets a dedicated tool. External plugins grew in number. Keeping them compatible demanded manual effort. The new wayfire-plugin command changes that. Install from a Git URL. Update all. Rebuild against the current Wayfire. List or remove as needed. It installs into an isolated prefix under XDG data home. Development files must exist first. With IPC plugins active, it reloads metadata. New plugins activate without full restart. The Wayfire announcement walks through the workflow.
Protocol support expanded significantly. Ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-manager-v1 improve screenshot, recording and portal compatibility. Ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1 lets panels and task switchers list windows via standard means. Ext-data-control-v1 joins the older wlroots version for clipboard managers. Security-context-v1 hides privileged globals from sandboxed clients. Configure the filtered protocols directly.
KDE and GTK global menu integration arrived too. Associate application menus with windows. Explicit synchronization via linux-drm-syncobj-v1 eliminates race conditions. Flickering drops. NVIDIA systems see the biggest gains. The Wayfire Shell protocol now handles arbitrary hotspots and proximity events. These additions address gaps that held back adoption in some environments.
Other tweaks improve daily use. Touch gestures feel more responsive. Simple Tile can temporarily maximize one window in a layout while preserving its place. Decoration buttons differentiate clicks. Left for full maximize. Middle for vertical. Right for horizontal. New scale options control fonts and padding. Window placement centers under the pointer yet stays in the work area.
Vswitch adds wraparound behavior that follows desktop order. Animate reads per-view properties to set animation type and length. Policy scripts gain fine control. Output config supports highres and highrr keywords for best available mode or refresh. Blur strength now follows a polynomial curve based on alpha. Shadows stay sharp. Content blurs. The GitHub release page lists dozens of such commits.
IPC capabilities grew. View-pre-map and related calls let clients inspect and configure windows before they appear. Plugins publish custom events. Output layout changes notify on mode, position, scale, transform, mirroring, VRR and depth. Config options list via IPC. Always-on-top state exposes. Typed properties share between plugins and scripts. These tools make automation and dynamic theming far easier.
The wf-shell components, including panel, background and dock, moved to new maintenance under trigg. Ported to GTK4. Added screen locker and sharing picker. Widgets improved. The ecosystem expands beyond the core compositor.
Wayfire began as a lightweight, customizable alternative. Its 3D effects recalled Compiz days while targeting Wayland. It served as default on Raspberry Pi OS for years, though recent images added Labwc as optional stacking choice. Stability improved through automated testing. The 0.11 cycle invested heavily there.
Explicit sync stands out for NVIDIA users. Earlier Wayland sessions on those cards suffered glitches. Support in wlroots 0.19 and compositors like Sway helped. Wayfire joins them. A January 2026 post by Michael Stapelberg on his blog explained how explicit sync resolved similar artifacts in Sway. The same principles apply here.
GNOME 50, reviewed on YouTube channels earlier this year, also embraced fractional scaling, VRR and explicit sync. Broader desktop convergence emerges. Yet Wayfire keeps its playful, plugin-driven personality. Users stack effects. They script behaviors. They avoid the heavier resource demands of some alternatives.
Bug fixes accompany the features. Black screen on DPMS resolved. Use-after-free prevented. Scale deactivation refocus corrected. Layer shell crashes with large margins fixed. XWayland movement and focus behaviors refined. The full GitHub tag for v0.11.0 catalogs over one hundred changes.
Contributors number many. Ammen99 authored core commits. Soreau, killown, marcusbritanicus, dkondor and others added protocols and fixes. Translations arrived. Testing feedback shaped decisions. The project maintains channels on Matrix, Discord and Libera Chat for discussion.
With 0.11, stability rises. Feature count grows. The 1.0 target feels tangible. API surfaces mature. Out-of-tree plugins gain better support. Developers signal readiness for wider production use. Not every distribution ships it by default yet. Those running wlroots-based environments can test easily.
Try the release. Build from source or grab packages where available. Feedback drives the final push to 1.0. The team welcomes reports on the new fractional scaling path, HDR behavior and Vulkan effects. Some options remain experimental. Defaults preserve compatibility.
Wayfire demonstrates what a focused, community-driven compositor achieves. It blends eye candy with practical modern Wayland support. HDR. Proper scaling. Sync primitives. Menu integration. All without sacrificing lightness. The next version could mark a new chapter. For now, 0.11 delivers tangible gains today.
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