Purism Begins Making Their Own Wayland Compositor For The Librem 5 Smartphone

While Purism continues eyeing KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell for delivering the user-interface options of the Librem 5 smartphone, they have begun developing their own Wayland compositor and their own shell too.

At the beginning of February we reported that Purism Might Develop An X11-Free Wayland Compositor Aligned With GNOME and they have indeed begun to do so.

They are developing their own Wayland compositor in making use of the wlroots and Rootston libraries for speeding up the bring-up of this compositor.

By re-using these libraries, they already have visible progress on this compositor. They mentioned, "We now have a mostly complete compositor working on the i.MX 6 development boards working, based on Wlroots and Rootston, with a start of a small phone desktop shell (phosh) providing window handling, full-screening of application windows, a first start of controls menu also allowing runtime display rotation—so you can at runtime rotate the display to either landscape or portrait mode and running applications will automatically be resized to the new display geometry."

They are also working on responsive/adaptive GTK+ applications, input support and more. The company also noted they received their first batch of i.MX8M evaluation kits this week with still hoping to ship their GNU/Linux privacy-minded smartphone using this newer NXP SoC.

These latest details were shared on the Purism blog.