Ariadne Conll, known for her work on the Audacious musical player, the development of the IRCV3 protocol, and leading the security team for Alpine Linux, has recently released the initial implementation of a new project called Wayback. This project allows for running desktop applications tied to the X11 protocol using components based on Wayland. Written in the SI language, the project is distributed as a public treasure under the CC0 license.
Wayback utilizes the Wayland composite server and enables launching full-screen X11 sessions using XWayland. The goal of this project is to streamline the transition away from the traditional X.org Server in the Alpine distribution. By focusing on only the necessary components for Wayland and XWayland, the maintenance costs of X11 applications in Alpine are expected to decrease.
The composite server in Wayback is built using the wlroots library from the SWAY project, which provides the basic primitives for creating composite servers. The code for Wayback is based on tinywl, a reference composite server from Wlroots that has been simplified to support separate XWayland launches.