Green Island: A New Qt-Based Wayland Compositor

Less than one day after the official release of Wayland 1.0 there is a new Wayland compositor that emerges. This new compositor for Wayland is dubbed "Green Island" and leverages Qt, QtQuick, and QML for creating a new and unique Linux desktop experience.

Pier Luigi announced Green Island this morning on the wayland-devel list. "I would like to share with you my work on a Wayland compositor and desktop shell made with QtQuick and QtCompositor and is using a set of components for QML to draw panels and widgets."

This Green Island compositor for Wayland is part of "Hawaii", a new Linux desktop environment being developed around Wayland. This desktop environment in turn is targeting Maui OS, a new Linux distribution. About the Maui desktop Linux distribution, "The idea behind Maui is to avoid traditional packages, the system provides a minimal image with kernel, systemd, connman and other core programs, the desktop environment and its dependencies and it's built from a set of git repositories from master or specific branches. Applications will be installed from bundles."

Below are a few prototype screenshots from Hawaii.

While the Hawaii Desktop Environment is intended for Maui OS, the Wayland-friendly desktop can be used on other Linux distributions too. The Hawaii Desktop is being hosted on GitHub. Packages are also being created for Arch Linux.

Unfortunately though due to the last minute API/protocol breakage within Wayland, Green Island currently requires Wayland 0.95 rather than the newly-minuted 1.0 release. As soon as the Qt Wayland support is ported to the 1.0 interfaces, Green Island / Hawaii should follow.

As said in the mailing list post, "This project is still young and needs your contributions, if you believe that a lightweight desktop environment and yet powerful, with attention to details and usability is possible this is a project you most certainly would want to take a look at. Green Island could also become the reference Qt-based compositor with your help."