Blender 3.4 Released with Native Wayland Support on Linux, Many Improvements
The biggest change in Blender 3.4, which comes exactly three months after Blender 3.3 LTS, is the enablement of native support for the next-generation Wayland windowing environment on GNU/Linux systems. Initial Wayland support in Blender landed back in 2020, as a build option, but now it’s finally enabled by default.
Until now, Blender recommended Linux users use the X11 display server, but now Wayland is fully supported in addition to X11. When Wayland is detected, Blender is using it as the preferred windowing environment.
Update (by Roy)
Release notes and more in Libre Arts:
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Blender 3.4 Release Notes
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Libre Arts - Weekly-ish recap — 7 December 2022
Week highlights: new releases of RawTherapee, Zrythm, VCV Rack, Cardinal, a release candidate of MuseScore 4.0, and more.
By Liam Dawe:
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Blender 3.4 is out now with Wayland support on Linux, Intel's Open Path Guiding added | GamingOnLinux
Blender, the absolute power-house free and open source 3D creation suite, has a big release out with Blender 3.4 and it's awesome. Used across film and games, it's one of the best FOSS projects around and has shown how FOSS can be a huge success.
For Linux users Blender 3.4 is especially sweet, since it now offers native Wayland support in addition to X11. They say with this release it has been tested working across GNOME Shell (Mutter), KDE (Plasma) & Sway (wlroots) based compositors.
One of the big overall features in this release is the inclusion of Intel's Open Path Guiding Library, which the Blender team say adds support for "path guiding in CPU to help reduce noise in scenes where finding a path to light is difficult for regular path tracing, for example when a room is lit by light coming through a small door crack" — sounds very useful. The example they showed in the release page shows what a massive improvement it can be too.