There's Wayland Changes Needed Before GNOME Will Be 100% Ported

With yesterday's GNOME 3.14 release the Wayland support is considered sufficient for day-to-day use running the GNOME stack on Wayland rather than an X11 Server on Linux. However, the GNOME developers don't consider this to be "100% complete" yet and there's still some more work needed to be cleared up on the Wayland side.

Red Hat's Matthias Clasen wrote to the Wayland developers' list this morning about the XDG-Shell status and gaps. XDG_Shell is about sharing more Wayland-related code and concepts among desktop environments / UIs being ported to Wayland. XDG-Shell is to Wayland as EWMH (Extended Window Manager Hints) is to X11. All of the major Linux desktop players are using XDG-Shell in their work and as a result it's evolving to fulfill the needs of everyone while the design gets hashed out in the Weston code-base.

Among the items that Clasen's still looking at that need to be addressed on the Wayland side including marking dialogs as modal, lowering windows, raising/activating windows, learning output characteristics, and finding out if there's desktop chrome/workarea that should be avoided.

When it comes to Wayland's drag-and-drop, there's also areas to address like snap-back animation if a drag ends unsuccessfully and a root window drop.

You can read Clasen's message in full on Wayland-devel.