Olivier Fourdan has merged support for using the xdg-system-bell protocol by XWayland for dealing with "system bell" functionality for Wayland compositors supporting this newer protocol for ringing the system bell or otherwise implementing a visual indicator that a system bell type event may have been triggered.

XWayland has already supported system bell type functionality where the Wayland compositor implements XkbBellNotifyMask support. But now XWayland supports xdg-system-bell as that newer Wayland protocol for handling system bell functionality. Rather than making it necessarily ring an audible system bell on systems supporting it, the xdg-system-bell protocol could be implemented by Wayland compositors as a visual cue or other indicator that such an event was triggered.

The xdg-system-bell protocol was rolled out in October with [1]Wayland Protocols 1.38 . It's quite open in the protocol for how compositors can implement the functionality:

"This requests rings the system bell on behalf of a client. How ringing the bell is implemented is up to the compositor. It may be an audible sound, a visual feedback of some kind, or any other thing including nothing.

The passed surface should correspond to a toplevel like surface role, or be null, meaning the client doesn't have a particular toplevel it wants to associate the bell ringing with. See the xdg-shell protocol extension for a toplevel like surface role."

In any event with [2]this merge it's now the newest feature of XWayland.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Protocols-1.38

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/1742