Announced just once month ago was [1]Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer build atop Wayland components . In the past month Wayback has been off to a quick start with [2]a goal of being production-ready next year and has also [3]already became a project under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella . Today marks the release of Wayback 0.1 as the first preview release for this X11 compatibility layer.

For those that missed the prior articles about Wayback, the open-source project sums itself up as:

"Wayback is an X11 compatibility layer that allows for running full X11-only desktop environments using Wayland. It is essentially an X11 server backed by Wayland, leveraging wlroots and Xwayland. Our goal is for Wayback to eventually be a completely drop-in replacement to the Xorg binary, thus reducing maintenance burden for distro maintainers."

Wayback 0.1 is a preview release while some users/developers are already using it daily. With Wayback 0.1 it is considered alpha quality and carries known issues like not yet supporting multi-monitor, Display Power Management Signalling (DPMS) not yet being supported, and various X.Org options not yet wired up.

Downloads and more details on this inaugural Wayback release via [4]wayback.freedesktop.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-X11-Wayland

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-2026-Plans

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-FreeDesktop.org

[4] https://wayback.freedesktop.org/news/2025/07/23/wayback-0.1-released/