Wayland Had An Impressive 2017 With KDE Support Maturing, Mir Switching Focus

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 13 December 2017 at 06:09 AM EST. Add A Comment
WAYLAND
Wayland had a very eventful year with it conquering more Linux desktops now since the switch to using GNOME Shell on Wayland with Ubuntu 17.10, Ubuntu's Mir compositor still being around but having switched to adding Wayland protocol support, KDE's Wayland support becoming day-to-day usable, and much more.

Earlier this week having provided the X.Org highlights of 2017, here is a look at the most popular Wayland events of 2017. It was certainly a great year for Wayland but 2018 could be even more exciting if the NVIDIA support gets squared away, the Vulkan bits get worked out for Vulkan-powered Wayland compositors, the remaining XWayland shortcomings get addressed, and the few remaining high profile Linux apps see native Wayland support.

Some Of The Lesser Known Wayland Compositors
While GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, and Enlightenment are among the most talked about Wayland desktop/compositor implementations right now, there are still many active smaller projects working on their own Wayland compositors. Here's a look at some of them.

It's Now Easier Trying Firefox Wayland Support On Arch Linux & Flatpak Distributions
A Phoronix reader has taken to improving the situation around being able to deploy Mozilla's Firefox web-browser natively on Wayland, particularly for Arch Linux distributions as well as those distributions supporting both Wayland and Flatpak.

Google Developers Working On Gaming Protocol For Wayland
Google developers are proposing the addition of a Gaming Input Protocol to Wayland.

April Fools' Or Should Wayland Switch Away From Using C?
An independent developer wrote a message on the Wayland mailing list this weekend how Wayland should "move away from C." While Rust is all the fun these days to those looking towards a "safer" programming language, it was suggested Wayland be re-implemented in Haskell.

It's Now Possible To Run Fedora On Chromebooks With Wayland
With Wayland now being present on Chrome OS for the Android compatibility layer, modifications to Crouton were made to allow Fedora Workstation with Wayland to run atop these Wayland-enabled Chromebooks.

UBports' Fork Of Unity 8 Plans To Eventually Get On Wayland
UBports is one of the leading teams right now planning a fork of the Unity 8 desktop now that it's being abandoned by Canonical. While a lead Mir developer hopes Mir will stick around and see compatibility with Wayland and Mark continues to believe in Mir, the UBports team is looking at getting Unity 8 on Wayland.

KDE Neon Makes It Easier To Now Try Plasma On Wayland
The Ubuntu-based KDE Neon distribution for its "dev unstable" image now comes pre-installed with the Wayland session option.

GTK's Vulkan Renderer Now Working On Wayland
The GTK toolkit's Vulkan renderer continues making quick progress.

Westfield: Wayland For HTML5/JavaScript
Westfield is a new independent project that provides a Wayland protocol XML parser and generator for JavaScript.

NVIDIA Publishes EGL External Platform Interface & Wayland Library
NVIDIA today is releasing their first Linux 378.xx driver series beta and alongside that new beta driver they are publishing their EGL External Platform interface and Wayland library.

Sway 0.12 Wayland Compositor Released
Sway 0.12 was released earlier this month as the newest feature update to this i3-compatible Wayland compositor.

Students Are Missing Out On An Incredible Opportunity To Get Involved With Mesa, Wayland
For student developers wishing to look for an interesting summer project while being paid by Google, the GSoC application deadlines are on Monday, 3 April. Sadly, the X.Org/Wayland/Mesa turnout so far for applicants are very low.

Skylane: A Wayland Implementation In Rust, Part of Perceptia Project
While there have been Rust bindings and other Rust-Wayland projects in the past, they have ended up relying upon C language components. With a new project dubbed "Skylane", there's a full Wayland protocol implementation written within Rust.

Wayland's Weston 2.0 Compositor Released
Wayland 1.13 was released earlier this week but the adjoining Weston compositor update didn't happen at the same time due to some last minute changes needing more time to test, but this Friday, Weston 2.0 is now shipping.

Mir Developer Hopes Community Will Use It & Add Wayland Compatibility
One of the lead developers on the Mir project at Canonical, Alan Griffiths, has finally opened up about this week's news of Ubuntu dropping efforts around Unity 8 and switching back to GNOME. This also is pretty much definitive that Mir is being dropped and Ubuntu will end up making use of Wayland.

KDE Plasma 5.9 Hits The Web With Global Menus, Better Wayland Support
Ending out January, the KDE crew has announced the release of Plasma 5.9.

KDE Plasma 5.12 Pushing For "An Awesome Release On Wayland"
While today's release of KDE Plasma 5.11 brings with it many Wayland improvements, KWin maintainer Martin Flöser (né Gräßlin) is proposing to get the Plasma 5.12 support into better shape on Wayland.

NVIDIA Makes It Easier On Fedora To Try GNOME With EGLStreams On Wayland
With Fedora not yet officially supporting the EGLStreams code-path for GNOME Mutter on Wayland, NVIDIA has created their own third-party Copr repository with said support.

GStreamer 1.12 Is On Approach With New Features, Wayland Zero-Copy Playback
GStreamer 1.12.0 will soon be released as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework.

Wayland's Weston 2.0 Beta Released
One day after the Wayland 1.13 Beta, the reference Weston compositor is updated to its 2.0 beta state.

Let us know in the forums what you hope to see out of Wayland in 2018.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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