Trying Out The Latest Wayland Linux Desktops With RBOS

With last weekend marking an update to the most commonly used Wayland Live CD, I decided to try it out and the different desktop environments that it ships using all the latest code, including the latest development code of Wayland/Weston and the various tool-kits.

The OS being talked about is, of course, Rebecca Black OS. It carries an odd name with the Linux distribution being named after the lead developer's "favorite celebrity."

Some of the theming is also quite odd around Rebecca Black OS.

Back in August 2012 was the last time I tried out Rebecca Black OS in Running Wayland: It Works, But A Lot Of Work Remains. With the Rebecca Black OS 2014-03-21 update, the latest Git master code of Wayland and Weston are pulled in. There's also Wayland-enabled versions of Clutter, SDL, GTK, Qt, and EFL. Among the desktop choices are GNOME, Hawaii, Orbital, and Elementary. There's also Wayland-supported versions of MPlayer and GStreamer, among other applications.

I spent about a half hour playing around with this new Rebecca Black OS release and the different Wayland-based desktops. This article is quickly a few thoughts of mine and some screenshots (albeit not too exciting since desktops that are both X11 and Wayland compatible should effectively look the same). New Wayland benchmarks should come in the weeks ahead.

The Weston compositor was in great shape when running the very latest code. In the few minutes I explored it, I didn't encounter any issues with the compositor and its stock shell.