Wayland Protocols 1.48 is out, and the headline addition is something Linux desktop users have been waiting on for a long time: xdg-session-management.
The protocol lets desktop environments and applications save and restore window states, positions, and sizes across restarts or crashes. The pull request was first opened in February 2020 and finally merged in March 2026 - six years later. It’s one of those gaps that made Wayland feel unfinished compared to X11, where session restoration had been a solved problem for decades.
In practice, this means your windows can come back where you left them after a reboot, and a compositor can recover a session after a crash without losing your layout. KDE’s KWin reportedly already has an early implementation.
Session management is the big one, but 1.48 also includes a few other additions worth noting:
<ul>
<li>Text input protocol updates - refinements to how text input is handled across clients</li>
<li>xx-cutouts - an experimental protocol for handling display cutouts (notches and the like)</li>
<li>xx-zones - experimental support for more advanced windowing features</li>
<li>xx-keyboard-filter - lets clients intercept and block keyboard events before they reach focused surfaces</li>
</ul>
The xx- prefix marks those last three as unstable and subject to change. Whether the major desktop environments beyond KDE move quickly to adopt xdg-session-management remains to be seen, but at least the foundation is now in place.

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Wayland Protocols 1.48 has been released, with the headline feature being xdg-session-management — a protocol that allows desktop environments and applications to save and restore window states, positions, and sizes across restarts or crashes. The pull request was first opened in February 2020 and took six years to merge. This closes a long-standing gap between Wayland and X11, where session restoration had been available for decades. KDE's KWin already has an early implementation. The release also includes text input protocol updates, and three experimental protocols (xx-cutouts for display notches, xx-zones for advanced windowing, and xx-keyboard-filter for intercepting keyboard events) marked with the xx- prefix to indicate instability.

Wayland Protocols 1.48 adds session management after six years