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swaywm
wlroots
C2017–2024
swaywm / wlroots · Archived

wlroots

A modular Wayland compositor library

35Distinct people
51Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
2.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A modular Wayland compositor library

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Games: yes, albiet mostly through Xwayland, which is a compatibility layer. Most games Just Work through this compatibility layer. OBS works fine, but you need a plugin.…

ddevault used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:03:30 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year51 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-10-19 17:28:42 UTC to 2024-10-15 06:43:18 UTC.

0510152017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 0 submissions, 13 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13013
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
wlroots ⚠️ Migrated to gitlab.freedesktop.org This project has migrated to gitlab.freedesktop.org. Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for building a Wayland compositor; or about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway. wlroots provides backends that abstract the underlying display and input hardware, including KMS/DRM, libinput, Wayland, X11, and headless backends, plus any custom backends you choose to write, which can all be created or destroyed at runtime and used in concert with each other. wlroots provides unopinionated, mostly standalone implementations of many Wayland interfaces, both from wayland.xml and various protocol extensions. We also promote the standardization of portable extensions across many compositors. wlroots provides several powerful, standalone, and optional tools that implement components common to many compositors, such as the arrangement of outputs in physical space. wlroots provides an Xwayland abstraction that allows you to have excellent Xwayland support without worrying about writing your own X11 window manager on top of writing your compositor. wlroots provides a renderer abstraction that simple compositors can use to avoid writing GL code directly, but which steps out of the way when your needs demand custom rendering code. wlroots implements a huge variety of Wayland compositor features and implements them right, so you can focus on the features that make your compositor unique. By using wlroots, you get high performance, excellent hardware compatibility, broad support for many wayland interfaces, and comfortable development tools - or any subset of these features you like, because all of them work independently of one another and freely compose with anything you want to implement yourself. Check out our wiki to get started with wlroots. Join our IRC channel: #sway-devel on Libera Chat. wlroots is developed under the direction of the sway project. A variety of wrapper libraries are available for using it with your favorite programming language. Building Install dependencies: meson wayland wayland-protocols EGL and GLESv2 (optional, for the GLES2 renderer) Vulkan loader, headers and glslang (optional, for the Vulkan renderer) libdrm GBM libinput (optional, for the libinput backend) xkbcommon udev pixman libseat If you choose to enable X11 support: xwayland (build-time only, optional at runtime) libxcb libxcb-render-util libxcb-wm libxcb-errors (optional, for improved error reporting) Run these commands: meson build/ ninja -C build/ Install like so: sudo ninja -C build/ install Contributing See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

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MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

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