Stage 8 — Protocol Compat

What it is. The protocols that make the everyday app ecosystem run: bars and wallpaper, decoration control, screenshots, fullscreen, and eventually X11 apps. Originally a broader “polish” catch-all, this stage was narrowed once the daily-driver work outgrew it — features like floating windows and layout rework now have their own stages (9–11) with their own gates, keeping the one-stage-one-deliverable rule honest.

Deliverable (from KICKOFF.md): the everyday app ecosystem runs — bars, screenshots, fullscreen video, X11 apps.

How it’s gone so far

Several of these landed early, driven by real need rather than roadmap order — a bar and a wallpaper are hard to live without day-to-day, so layer-shell support arrived well before this stage was “next”:

• wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1 — bars, panels, and wallpaper (e.g. quickshell) render in the correct z-order (into the layer trees set up back in Stage 2) and reserve their exclusive screen space, so tiled windows never sit underneath them. One real bug here: layer surfaces that arrive before any output exists yet were being silently dropped; the fix tracks them as pending and attaches them to the next output that shows up, instead of requiring output-then-surface ordering.
• Server-side decorations (xdg-decoration-unstable-v1) — 0xide always claims decoration mode, so clients skip drawing their own title bar/CSD: bare, borderless windows by default.
• Screenshots/screen recording (wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 + xdg-output) — tools like grim and wf-recorder capture 0xide’s real composited output directly. xdg-output specifically exists because screenshot tools need to learn each output’s logical position/size, or grim fails with a 0×0 capture.
• Fullscreen — both client-requested (F11, mpv --fs, honored on map for apps launched fullscreen) and compositor-driven (Mod+F toggle). A fullscreen window covers its output’s full box in a dedicated scene layer above the bars but below overlay surfaces, and other windows stay tiled beneath it. Per the xdg-shell protocol every state request must be answered with a configure even when denied — 0xide previously wasn’t listening at all, which was a protocol violation, not just a missing feature. Closely related fix from the same work: windows are declared tiled in their very first configure, carrying their predicted tile size — without a tiled state the configure size is only a floating-style hint, and clients with a remembered window size (browsers especially) would map at their own size and overflow across outputs.

Not yet started: XWayland (X11 app compatibility) — the one remaining gate for this stage.

Status

Substantially done. Layer-shell, decorations, screencopy, and fullscreen are all in daily use; XWayland closes it out.