Trying Out The Latest Wayland Linux Desktops With RBOS

The GNOME Shell with its Mutter-Wayland is likely the best Wayland-supported desktop at this point. GNOME on Wayland can be experimented with as well using Fedora 20. Using the Fedora 20 and Rawhide packages has been my preferred means of delivering Wayland/XWayland benchmarks to date. With the upcoming GNOME 3.12 release, GNOME's Wayland support will be even better but is still considered a tech preview.

Enlightenment seemed unresponsive or something wasn't working right. This Wayland Live CD was running from a USB stick and connected to an HP EliteBook with Intel Core i5 Sandy Bridge CPU with HD Graphics 3000.

The Hawaii desktop that's focused entirely around running on Wayland rather than X11 is also making good progress, but it's still far from being a full-featured, day-to-day Linux desktop.

Orbital is also making progress as a Wayland project but still isn't full-featured compared to running the GNOME Shell on Wayland.

If you want to see how this live Linux environment works with Wayland for your purposes, download the new release. Using the live environment is a bit sluggish, so if you have an extra system to spare, I would instead recommend running instead the latest rawhide packages in Fedora. Stay tuned to Phoronix for some upcoming Wayland performance tests.