Sway 1.7 Released With VR Headset DRM Leasing, Renames "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia"

After working its way through the release candidate process, Sway 1.7 is out this weekend as the newest feature release for this i3-inspired, lightweight Wayland compositor.

Sway 1.7 is notable in that it offers better zero-copy direct scanout support thanks to making use of the DMA-BUF feedback protocol. Other Wayland desktop compositors have also been quick in supporting the DMA-BUF feedback extension as well. The enhanced zero-copy direct scanout support for full-screen windows is easily one of the best features of Sway 1.7.

For those with virtual reality head-mounted displays (VR HMDs), Sway 1.7 also adds support for Wayland's DRM leasing protocol to make efficient use there as well.

Sway 1.7 also now allows tabs to be dragged with the mouse, Wayland-native urgency support using the xdg-activation-v1 protocol, and various other new features.

If you use NVIDIA graphics and are a fan of Sway, the "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" option for enabling the unsupported NVIDIA support has now been renamed. Now that NVIDIA is at least supporting the GBM API with their proprietary driver stack, Sway developers decided to come up with a friendlier option. The --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia has been renamed to "--unsupported-gpu" for enabling the NVIDIA driver although officially the NVIDIA proprietary Linux driver stack is unsupported by Sway.

Downloads and more details on Sway 1.7 via GitHub.