GNOME's Mutter Loses Some Of Its X11 Dependence

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year associated with the GNOME project was on reworking the Mutter compositor from requiring X11/XWayland code-paths for starting the Wayland compositor.

Student developer Armin Krezović worked to address the issue that even when Mutter is acting as a Wayland compostior rather than just an X window manager, the X11 support is still present and there's a hard dependency on XWayland being present, even if it goes unused. Armin was partially successful in his summer work in allowing Mutter to act as a Wayland-only compositor, free from any XWayland support if so desired.

Armin was able to make Mutter work on Wayland without any X bits present or XWayland needing to be started. He also had a goal of making Wayland clients start without X11 support being present, but he didn't have time to accomplish that goal.

Those interested in this GNOME Mutter GSoC work can find a recap via this blog post. The patches are currently staged via GitHub. With them, Mutter can be started with a --no-x11 switch if you wish to run Mutter on Wayland without any legacy support.