Last week Debian 13 (Trixie) was released and there have been some updates and additions in the packages that I maintain, that I wanted to write about. I think they are not worth of being added to the release notes, but I still wanted to list some of the changes and some of the new packages.

sway

Sway, the tiling Wayland compositor was version 1.7 in Bookworm. It was updated to version 1.10 (and 1.11 is already in experimental and waiting for an upload to unstable). This new version of sway brings, among a lot of other features, updated support for touchpad gestures and support for the ext-session-lock-v1 protocol, which allows for more robust and secure screen locking. The configuration snippet that activates the default sway background is now shipped in the sway-backgrounds package instead of being part of the sway package itself.

The default menu application was changed from dmenu to wmenu. wmenu is a Wayland native alternative to dmenu which I packaged and it is now recommended by sway.

There are some small helper tools for sway that were updated: swaybg was bumped from 1.2.0 to 1.2.1, swaylock was bumped from 1.7.2 to 1.8.2.

The grimshot script, which is a script for making screenshots, was part of the sway’s contrib folder for a long time (but was shipped as a separate binary package). It was removed from sway and is now part of the sway-contrib project. There are some other useful utilities in this source package that I might package in the future.

slurp, which is used by grimshot to select a region, was updated from version 1.4 to version 1.5.

labwc

I uploaded the first labwc package two years ago and I’m happy it is now part of a stable Debian release. Labwc is also based on wlroots, like sway. It is a window-stacking compositor and is inspired by openbox. I used openbox for a long time back in the day before I moved to i3 and I’m very happy to see that there is a Wayland alternative.

foot

Foot is a minimalistic and fast Wayland terminal emulator. It is mostly keyboard driven. foot was updated from version 1.13.1 to 1.21.0. The probably most important change for users updating might be the fact that:

• Control+Shift+u is now bound to unicode-input instead of show- urls-launch, to follow the convention established in GTK and Qt
• show-urls-launch now bound to Control+Shift+o

et cetera

The Wayland kiosk cage was updated from 0.1.4 to 0.2.0.

The waybar bar for wlroots compositors was updated from 0.9.17 to 0.12.0.

swayimg was updated from 1.10 to 3.8 and now brings support for custom key bindings, support for additional image types (PNM, EXR, DICOM, Farbfeld, sixel) and a gallery mode.

tofi, another dmenu replacement was updated from 0.8.1 to 0.9.1, wf-recorder a tool for screen recording in wlroots-based compositors, was updated from version 0.3 to version 0.5.0. wlogout was updated from version 1.1.1 to 1.2.2. The application launcher wofi was updated from 1.3 to 1.4.1. The lightweight status panel yambar was updated from version 1.9 to 1.11. kanshi, the tool for managing and automatically switching your output profiles, was updated from version 1.3.1 to version 1.5.1.

usbguard was updated from version 1.1.2 to 1.1.3.

added

• fnott - a lightweight notification daemon for wlroots based compositors
• fyi - a utility to send notifications to a notification daemon, similar to notify-send
• pipectl - a tool to create and manage short-lived named pipes, this is a dependency of wl-present. wl-present is a script around wl-mirror which implements output mirroring for wlroots-based compositors
• poweralertd - a small daemon that notifies you about the power status of your battery powered devices
• wlopm - control power management of outputs
• wlrctl - command line utility for miscellaneous wlroots Wayland extensions
• wmenu - already mentioned, the new default launcher of sway
• wshowkeys - shows keypresses in wayland sessions, nice for debugging
• libsfdo - libraries implementing some freedesktop.org specs, used by labwc