Wayland and Fedora

[Matthias Clasen]

As you may have seen, I have proposed[1] that GNOME should move towards Wayland. We hope to have experimental Wayland compositor support in GNOME shell in the fall, and a complete port of the GNOME desktop a year from now.  See [2] for more details.

What does this mean for Fedora ?

I don't think this will affect the rest of the distribution in a majorly disruptive way. In particular, it won't force other desktop environments to move away from X. gdm will learn to launch Wayland-based sessions, but it will still be able to start X-based sessions. X applications will continue to run as they used to, including remotely. And GNOME applications will continue to work under X.

Here is what I envision:

f19:
 - wayland + weston (the reference Wayland compositor) are available
 - gtk3 and clutter are built with their Wayland backends
 - it is possible to test individual GTK+ applications under weston, by setting GDK_BACKEND=wayland

f20:
 - will have a gnome-shell that can run as a Wayland compositor
 - gdm can start Wayland and X sessions
 - there will be an experimental GNOME/Wayland session in the session chooser (probably in an optional package)
 - most GNOME apps can run under Wayland
 - the X-based GNOME will still be the default

f21:
 - the Wayland based GNOME will be the default
 - a GNOME/X session will still be available

(of course, all of this may change, depending on how the porting works out).


[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2013-March/msg00059.html
[2] https://live.gnome.org/Wayland