Wayland's Orbital Shell Is Still Under Development

Several months ago I wrote about Orbital as a new shell for Wayland's Weston. While not much has been widely heard about the shell plug-in since that point, it's still under development and this week more patches landed.

Orbital is a Wayland shell client written in Qt5 with Qt Quick 2. Orbital additionally relies upon the Nuclear Weston Shell plug-in. Nuclear implements a custom protocol for synchronizing Weston with a shell client. Qt 5.2+ and Nuclear are the only dependencies for this Orbital Shell.

While there's been no major announcements about Orbital in recent weeks, it's being actively developed. There's still interesting commit activity and some big changes this week.

For those wanting to try out Orbital this weekend on Wayland/Weston, it can be fetched from this GitHub repository. Below is an older video showing off Orbital in action.