The Limitations Of Wayland On Fedora 21

With Fedora 21 there's the GNOME 3.14 Wayland session that's starting to become day-to-day usable but isn't yet complete. There's also a long list of known applications that don't yet play well outside of X11 and other shortcomings.

Following last month's release of Fedora 21 Alpha I played around with the GNOME Wayland session and shared my thoughts and ran some XWayland benchmarks. The Fedora Project Magazine has also now put the Fedora 21 gnome-session-wayland-session through its paces and delivered a brief write-up. In their write-up they cover a partial list of applications known to break under Wayland some shortcomings. They also do a brief overview of the Wayland architecture and other facts, if you've been living under a rock the past few years, or just not reading enough Phoronix.

Among the applications that don't support Wayland yet is GNOME's Terminal, Totem, PiTiVi, and Empathy. For these and other applications, at least you can fall-back gracefully to using XWayland.

Among the other issues with running GNOME on Wayland right now is the mouse cursor in XWayland not changing, window resizing with XWayland being an issue, some border issues due to client side decorations, some gestures in the GNOME Shell not being supported, and setup issues with multiple screens.

Read more about trying out Fedora 21 on Wayland via FedoraMagazine.org. It's not going to be until at least Fedora 22 until developers make a push for Wayland being the default over the X.Org Server.