The Hawaii Desktop Readies To Dance On Wayland

With the Green Island Compositor, the Hawaii Desktop is looking to be the very first Wayland-friendly desktop environment for Linux.

Back in October just after the release of Wayland 1.0 is when I first mentioned Green Island / Hawaii. The Hawaii desktop is the product of the Maui OS team, a Linux distribution that's trying to avoid traditional packages and instead provide a minimal image with the Linux kernel, systemd, ConnMan, and other core components, while being powered by a Wayland desktop.

While carrying a focus for Maui OS, the Wayland-driven desktop can be installed for other Linux distributions too.

It's been a few months since hearing anything about these Wayland desktop efforts, but it turns out that the efforts are still ongoing and quite active. The GitHub repositories for the Hawaii Desktop project range from being updated hours to a couple days ago.

The work on the Hawaii Desktop includes early ports for KDE Frameworks 5, the KDE library staging area Qt 5 pulls, the Green Island Wayland Compositor and Shell, a log-in manager, their Swordfish file manager, and other work for the Wayland-driven desktop.

I was reminded of the work on Hawaii / Green Island when writing a few days ago about Qt 5.1's better support for Wayland.