Wayland-Based Hawaii Desktop Planned For Fedora 22

With the upcoming Fedora 20 release there is an early tech preview experience of Wayland with the GNOME Shell. Already expressed as a possibility is having Wayland be the default display server over the X11/X.Org with Fedora 21 about six months later, but there's now already talk of another Wayland-based desktop coming around Fedora 22.

Right now most of the Wayland tinkering done on Fedora Linux is via either the Weston compositor and its standard shell or with the GNOME 3.10 packages that have their early Wayland support. However, there's already some early plans being drafted to have the Hawaii Desktop on Wayland be a feature of Fedora 22 in about one year from now.

Earlier this week on Phoronix I wrote about the Wayland-based Hawaii still being in development. There hasn't been much news out of the open-source project recently and work on its "Green Island" Wayland compositor has more or less halted, but the Qt5-based desktop shell for various form factors is still being actively pursued.

After writing the Phoronix article earlier this week about the Hawaii Desktop status, Lubomir Rintel wrote in to share work that he and others have been working on -- in cooperation with upstream Hawaii -- to get the desktop in Fedora.

Lubomir Rintel shared in an email to Phoronix, "we're in the process of importing Hawaii desktop into Fedora package collection. Currently, we're importing the required parts of the Qt5 stack and will proceed importing required parts of KDE Foundation 5 (they currently depend on Qt 5.2, alpha release of which is in Rawhide targeting Fedora 21 now) and Hawaii desktop."

It was additionally added that once the packages are in a state (along with the desktop) that it's "reasonably complete" they will submit a ticket with the Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee (FESCo) to get the feature recognized in Fedora. They have no specific milestone but they feel right now all the pieces to the puzzle should be there with Fedora 22.

More information on the Hawaii desktop option for Fedora can be found on this Wiki-based changes page.

With Fedora 22 will also likely be around the time that KDE Frameworks 5 with KDE Plasma Workspaces 2 is ready to shine on Fedora Linux. This could make for Fedora 22 being a very interesting Wayland-based distribution in the second half of 2014. (We could also hope for the E19 Wayland Compositor and some Xfce Wayland love by then too.)