Hawaii Is Looking Great As A Wayland Desktop

The Enlightenment Wayland Compositor wasn't the only Wayland desktop project seeing attention at FOSDEM earlier this month, but the Qt5-based Hawaii desktop also received some stage time.

We have been covering the Hawaii desktop project on Phoronix since its inception and continues showing great signs of progress. Back in late December we covered the Hawaii 0.2 release. This latest version of the Qt5-powered Wayland-based desktop offered multi-screen support, background support, modal dialogs, support for multiple workspaces and a switcher, lock screen, PolicyKit agent, notifications, a style API, and many other additions as the developers seek to bring up this modern open-source desktop.

Shared at FOSDEM were some of the Hawaii plans coming up and those items included Weston 1.4 support, more core applications, dropdown windows support, a workspaces overview, animated wallpapers, a screensaver, greater modularization, replaceable components, support for loadable elments, and work towards a desktop/mobile convergence strategy.

The SDDM log-in manager also still needs to be ported to Wayland, there's room for improved task management and applications, the FreeDesktop.org Notifications 1.2 interface still needs to be implemented in full, and there's more preference modules to still code.

Those wishing to learn more about the Hawaii Desktop that goes without caring about X11 or Mir support can be found via the FOSDEM PDF slides. The open-source desktop is still being hosted at Maui-Project.org.