One of the interesting open-source projects to come about this year was [1]Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer using Wayland . Wayback [2]could be used by default on Alpine Linux next year among other distributions. For ending out 2025 development, Wayback 0.3 is now available.

[3]Wayback 0.1 was published in July as the initial preview release for this X11 compatibility layer. [4]Wayback 0.2 came in August and since then there hasn't been much news to report on it.

Wayback in recent months has found its way into the Alpine Linux community repository and is also available on Fedora 42 and Fedora 43. Wayback 0.3 was released this week with documentation / man page updates, overhauling of the custom command line option parser to handle more X.Org options, and various bug fixes. Nothing too exciting in Wayback 0.3 but just fixes and refining this compatibility layer.

In the [5]Wayback 0.3 announcement they share that they are exploring moving from XWayland's rootful to rootless mode among other improvements in 2026.



[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-0.1-Released

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-0.2-Released

[5] https://wayback.freedesktop.org/news/2025/12/22/wayback-0.3-released/