Qt & Wayland-Powered Hawaii 0.2 Desktop Released

An open-source Christmas present for Wayland users this year is the release of Hawaii 0.2.0, the fresh desktop powered by Qt5 and Wayland.

We've been talking a lot about the Hawaii desktop environment going back to the beginning of this year with the desktop -- as part of the Maui Project -- being designed around Wayland. Hawaii has been a "usable" desktop for Wayland/Weston since April while there's also been some work on the project's Green Island Wayland compositor.

With the Hawaii 0.2.0 desktop, it's now dependent upon the Qt 5.2 tool-kit along with the 1.3 releases of Wayland and the Weston compositor. This is the project's first stable release.

The shell for Hawaii 0.2.0 features a launcher, app chooser, panel, multi-screen fixes for shell windows, notification bubbles, click-through notifications, PolicyKit agent, a lock-screen without password request, a C++ Weston plug-in for extra effects, custom themes support, and various bug-fixes.

It's the desktop's first stable release and they're still playing catch-up with the more mature open-source desktop environments. According to the developers, "the plan is to release a desktop with the most important features available so that people can start using it. More features such as power management will be available later."

Details on Hawaii 0.2.0 can be found via the announcement at Maui-Project.org and the 0.2.0 release details from the Maui OS Wiki.

For those out of the loop, the Maui OS project is about providing a new Linux distribution that provides advanced technologies, a clean out-of-the-box experience, is fully open-source with an open governance model, and its desktop is a responsive design. Maui OS is available from Maui-Project.org.