Wayland-Based Hawaii Desktop Is Still Active

While there's been a lot of Wayland announcements recently, there hasn't been much news on the Wayland-powered Qt5-based Hawaii desktop that's part of the Maui project. Though they have hit a roadblock in their "Green Island" Wayland compositor, the desktop shell continues to move forward with new features and functionality.

The Hawaii desktop on Wayland was shown off at the beginning of the calendar year and the Qt5-based Green Island Wayland compositor was introduced one year ago. Since April, the project has claimed to be a usable desktop with Wayland's Weston.

To some dismay there hasn't been any major Hawaii/Maui news over the summer, but code development is still happening on the Hawaii Shell. The Qt5 shell for desktop, netbook, and tablet interfaces is still advancing and the most recent commits to hits Git repository (GitHub) are just a few days old.

Recent work on the shell includes an easy script to run the Hawaii desktop, support for shell pop-up windows, multi-output support for modal dialogs along with other features like fade and zoom, improved lock support, forcing of the Wayland back-end for Qt and GTK+ libraries, an animated wallpaper background, and numerous fixes.

While the shell is moving along, the Green Island compositor isn't changing much as the desktop seems to be doing fine on Weston. A commit to the Green Island Git repository two weeks ago removes the plugins as "we are not ready for a system compositor yet and a C++ desktop compositor is not as compelling as it might sound."

Beyond the shell and compositor, there's also numerous other code projects part of the Hawaii desktop that also continue to be developed.