Maynard: A Lightweight Wayland Desktop

Collabora has publicly announced this morning Maynard, a new Wayland-based shell that's lightweight and should work great for the Raspberry Pi.

Collabora has been doing a lot of contract work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation over the past year, including porting Wayland to work well on this low-end, low-cost ARM single-board computer. Developers and users have been after a lightweight desktop to use on the Wayland-powered Raspberry Pi but there hasn't been any yet with GNOME Shell and other Wayland-compatible desktops being too heavy (I guess they don't yet count Enlightenment's Wayland compositor or wasn't ready for their time-frame).

Collabora developers ended up writing their own Wayland shell based upon Weston's GTK-Shell. Maynard is still considered a work-in-progress but is taking shape while being lightweight to run well on the Raspberry Pi and other hardware. Unfortunately there is no XWayland support so legacy X11 applications won't work. GTK applications also don't work well on Maynard right now due to taking a long time to start, among other issues.

Marco Barisione mentioned this new Maynard project out of his work at Collabora via his blog. The code to the new Wayland environment is hosted on GitHub.