Blender 3.4 to Enable Native Wayland Support for Linux

Blender is a popular 3D creation suite that many professionals use.

The developers of Blender have recently added native Wayland support for Linux in the daily builds, and have confirmed adding the support in the upcoming Blender 3.4 release.

This is probably one of the significant development progress after Blender 3.0 release last year!

Blender With Native Wayland

Wayland is a replacement to the X11 display server that aims to be a simpler and more modern solution.

Providing native Wayland support has become necessary, mainly because many distros now come with that kind of support out of the box.

With more Wayland support in the works and users switching to a distro with native support, this move was a given.

With the daily builds, the libdecor library has made this possible. If you want to test it out, you need to have it installed for Blender to work correctly with native Wayland support.

While initial support for Wayland was present in Blender since 2020, it was not ready for prime time. It had a lot of issues, such as no tablet support, no NDOF support, no Hi-DPI support, and similar.

Now, it looks like most of those issues are gone.

Expect it With Blender 3.4

A blog post by one of Blender's developers Campbell Barton, reveals that if all goes well with the daily builds, the Wayland support is coming to Blender 3.4.

Here's what he mentions:

Now Wayland is enabled in our official builds, I hope to validate it for the up coming release. So unless issues arise which we’re unable to resolve, it will be officially supported in Blender 3.4x onward.

At this point, I can only hope that no significant issues affect its integration.

Otherwise, it may push back to a later release cycle.

Blender 3.4 will release in early December 2022, with improvements across the board and new features such as headless rendering for Linux, improvements for Sculpt, Intel Open PGL integration, and more.

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Blender with Wayland has some technical limitations. You can find more details on that in the blog post.

💬 Are you excited to try out native Wayland support on Blender?