Denial WM: New Wayland Compositor With Flutter Directly Embedded

The newest Wayland compositor to talk about and discuss is Denial, a Wayland compositor focused on optimal Arch Linux integration and that embeds the Flutter engine directly into the codebase. Denial makes use of the Rust programming language and leverages Smithay to help in the compositor responsibilities. Denial is currently considered alpha software as a Flutter-native Wayland compositor. Flutter's lead developer wrote into Phoronix and explained its design as: "Denial does not run Flutter as an application on top of another compositor: it embeds the Flutter Engine directly, while a Rust and Smithay compositor handles Wayland protocol state, input, DMA-BUFs, DRM/KMS presentation and native resource lifetimes. Wayland DMA-BUF-backed application buffers are imported into the Flutter scene as GPU textures (using EGL_EXT_image_dma_buf_import) requiring no CPU readback, pixel copy or texture upload. Flutter renders directly into GBM buffers used for KMS presentation. There is no intermediate render target, final blit or second compositor pass. Denial is already my daily desktop: - native Wayland applications (such as Chromium, Firefox, Blender, Discord) - XWayland - Steam and demanding Proton games (I tested Arknights: Endfield, Wuthering Waves, Neverness to Everness and Final Fantasy XIV) all run perfectly in my testing - multi-monitor configuration, with a dedicated Denial backend implemented for nwg-displays and ready for upstream submission - notifications - audio, with per-window volume control - screen locking and DPMS - screen sharing (tested with OBS) - signed Arch packages with CI/CD ... The project also retains the normal Flutter development workflow: an optional development package provides Flutter Inspector, DevTools and hot reload for the live desktop shell without restarting the compositor or closing running applications. Profiling and debug modes can be enabled/disabled while Denial is running. Denial uses customized Flutter Engine and Skia builds with compositor-specific optimizations, including external-texture damage tracking, specialized frame scheduling and elimination of heap allocations in hot draw-dependency paths. Optimization is essential in a desktop compositor so a large part of the work is spent optimizing for low and consistent frame times." Looks to be an interesting project and at least with some more original goals than some of the other Wayland compositors out there. Those wishing to learn more about Denial can do so via DenialWM.org and the GPLv3+ code is hosted on GitHub.