E-Ink displays offer significant advantages in power efficiency and readability, but their integration into modern Linux desktops remains fragmented. Most Wayland compositors assume high-refresh-rate displays, leading to suboptimal rendering, ghosting, and unnecessary power consumption on e-ink panels.

In this talk, we introduce Caster, an open-hardware electrophoretic display controller, designed to improve e-ink rendering and latency. By extending the Wayland Content Type Hint protocol, Caster enables applications to signal content types (e.g., text, images, video) to the compositor, allowing for dynamic refresh optimization on e-ink screens.

We’ll walk through the implementation, showcase a live demo of Caster, and discuss how we can make e-ink a first-class citizen in Linux.

Alexander Soto is a community organizer, educator, software engineer, and founder of Modos. His interests are community-building, social justice, education, and leveraging technology to address social problems.

The Linux App Summit (LAS) brings the global Linux community together to learn, collaborate, and help grow the Linux application ecosystem. Through talks, panels, and Q&A sessions, we encourage attendees to share ideas, make connections, and join our goal of building a common app ecosystem.