Wayland's Wild Decade From v1.0 Release To Usable GNOME/KDE Desktop Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 29 December 2019 at 10:15 AM EST. 91 Comments
WAYLAND
The 2010s saw the release of Wayland 1.0, Ubuntu's Mir initially being a "competitor" to now embracing Wayland, desktop environments like GNOME and KDE now having good support for it as an alternative to X11, and other functionality continues to be added to Wayland compositors and its standard protocols.

In this weekend having looked back at the X.Org highlights of the 2010s, here is a look back at the most popular Wayland news articles of the 2010s.

NVIDIA Presents Its Driver Plans To Support Mir/Wayland & KMS On Linux
As anticipated, Andy Ritger of NVIDIA presented at XDC2014 in Bordeaux, France the company's plans to support alternative window managers beyond X11 when it comes to their Linux graphics driver. NVIDIA is working on some significant improvements to their closed-source Linux driver to support Mir and Wayland.

Wayland 1.0 Officially Released
Wayland 1.0 along with the reference Weston 1.0 reference compositor were officially released on Monday.

Canonical Releases "WLCS" Wayland Conformance Suite 1.0
While Ubuntu is not currently using Wayland by default with its GNOME Shell desktop and it doesn't look like they will try again until Ubuntu 20.10, the option is still available and they continue working in the direction of a Wayland Linux desktop future. One of their interesting "upstream" contributions in this area is with the Wayland Conformance Suite.

Qt & Wayland-Powered Hawaii 0.2 Desktop Released
An open-source Christmas present for Wayland users this year is the release of Hawaii 0.2.0, the fresh desktop powered by Qt5 and Wayland.

Ubuntu Announces Mir, A X.Org/Wayland Replacement
Canonical has lift the lid on Mir, it's name for the display server they are designing in-house. Mir will replace the X.Org Server on Ubuntu and it's not based upon Wayland or any other existing display server project.

Fedora 25 To Run Wayland By Default
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has decided that Fedora 25 will indeed ship the Wayland display server by default in place of the X.Org Server.

Google Chrome 50 Released With Wayland Support
The exciting day has continued of open-source/Linux news with Google now releasing Chrome 50.

An Experimental GNOME Shell Running On Wayland
On Wednesday of the 2012 LF Collaboration Summit, besides the X and Wayland integration talk, there was a second discussion concerning Wayland/Weston during a Tizen track. During this talk were a few tid-bits of interesting information revealed, such as an experimental GNOME 3.x desktop on Wayland.

Wayland 1.2.0 Released, Joined By Weston Compositor
After about three months of development, Wayland 1.2.0 along with the matching version of its Weston reference compositor have been released. The updated Wayland/Weston stack bring many new features to the table.

Two Features Wayland Will Have That X Doesn't
While the discussion surrounding the Wayland Display Server and Canonical's plans to deploy Ubuntu atop Wayland continue to be ongoing within our forums (here, here, and here) and elsewhere, some new technical capabilities and plans for Wayland have been discussed. Here's two features that Wayland is set to have that is not currently supported by the X.Org Server.

A Note To Canonical: "Don't Piss On Wayland"
In addition to X.Org and Wayland developers criticizing Canonical on Google+ about the Mir display server, there was a colorful discussion about this new open-source project on the Wayland IRC channel.

ADWC: A Tiling Window Manager For Wayland
There's now the first tiling manager for Wayland. Called ADWC, this open-source tiling manager can already start applications using XWayland. There's some videos showing off this Weston fork, including the Opera web-browser and KDE's KWrite running on Wayland.

GNOME Lands Mainline NVIDIA Wayland Support Using EGLStreams
While waiting for a new API that can succeed GBM and is agreed upon by both NVIDIA and the open-source community, GNOME developers have gone ahead and merged support for using EGLStreams into their Mutter compositor so that the current proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver will work with GNOME on Wayland.

Wayland Preparing For 1.0 Stable Release
This weekend at FOSDEM 2012 what Kristian Høgsberg is expected to say in Brussels will surprise many of you: Wayland 1.0 is gearing up for release as their first -- stable -- release. Wayland is supposed to be ready to take on the Linux desktop world.

2016 Wayland Experiences: GNOME: Perfect, KDE: Bad, Enlightenment: Good
Developer Pavlo Rudyi has written a blog post about his experiences with the different desktop environments currently supporting Wayland. The results aren't a big surprise, but nevertheless it's great to see the continued interest in Wayland and the ongoing work by many different parties in ensuring Wayland will be able to dominate the Linux desktop.

Upstream X/Wayland Developers Bash Canonical, Mir
Canonical's decision to develop Mir, their own display server not derived from X11 or Wayland, hit many as a big surprise today. Canonical previously committed to Wayland in a future Ubuntu release but now it turns out that for months they have secretly been rolling their own solution behind closed doors.

Features Coming To Wayland, Weston 1.4
Last week was marked by the first Wayland/Weston 1.4 Alpha release ahead of the planned general availability in January. For those that aren't up to date on all of the development activity, I've now had the time go through and highlight all of the major changes that landed in Git.

Wayland Is Now Playing Well With NVIDIA, ATI Drivers
For those of you interested in running the Wayland Display Server on your NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards, without running it nestled inside an X Server, it should work if you use the newest Linux kernel code.

NVIDIA Presents Over GBM vs. EGLStreams, The Big Wayland Support Debate Continues
James Jones of NVIDIA just finished taking the stage at XDC2016 where he was talking about Unix device memory allocation, which comes down to the big EGLStreams vs. GBM debate... A.k.a. NVIDIA pushing a different approach for their Wayland support from the Wayland compositors currently focusing around GBM for buffers. This debate is leading towards the development of a new API.

The Wayland/Weston Fork Is Now "Banned"
It's now becoming quite easy to understand why the developer of the Northfield/Norwood fork of Wayland was ejected from the Wayland development community and banned from development communication channels.

GNOME Will Move Full-Speed With Wayland Support
We already know that KDE developers aren't fond of Mir, Canonical's display server for the Unity desktop not derived from X.Org and Wayland. KDE developers aren't happy about it, some Xfce developers have also expressed dissatisfaction with the recent Canonical changes, and now there's a GNOME response. What's GNOME doing about Mir? They're laying out plans right now to move hard and fast with Wayland support!

NVIDIA To Issue An Update On Their Support Of Mir & Wayland
While there's no supportive driver out at this time, NVIDIA continues to be working in the direction of supporting non-X11 windowing systems like Mir and Wayland.

Trying Out Ubuntu GNOME 16.10, Wayland Session Not So Great
With today's Ubuntu 16.10 release one of the exciting spins we've been looking forward to is Ubuntu GNOME 16.10, which has an experimental Wayland session available but is not the default. I spent a few minutes trying out Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 this morning.

NVIDIA 364.12 Arrives With Wayland & Mir Support
NVIDIA's 364 Linux driver series is now available and it's pretty darn exciting!

LF Collab 2012: Killing Blobs, Wayland, DTrace, Etc
The 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit concluding this week in San Francisco. In case you missed out on any coverage of the interesting sessions from the event, here's a run-down of the worthwhile information that was shared and discussed, plus a few other extra tid-bits from the invite-only event.

GNOME 3.16 On Fedora 22: Wayland vs. X.Org
In complementing this morning's early Fedora 22 Workstation benchmarks, here's some numbers in looking at Fedora 22's GNOME Shell 3.16 desktop under an X.Org Server as well as Wayland.

OpenRISC Emulator In JavaScript Can Run Wayland
An interesting open-source project pointed out to Phoronix this week was an OpenRISC emulator that's written in JavaScript. Making things more interesting is that it can now even run Wayland and a Linux image with keyboard support while being able to use JavaScript and other common open-source programs from this JavaScript-based emulator that runs in modern browsers.

Ubuntu Is Going To Deploy Wayland With Unity
This is going to be short as I have another flight to catch to San Diego for the next week [if anyone wants to meet-up to discuss Linux, Phoronix, or the Phoronix Test Suite in the area, contact me]. Anyhow, Mark Shuttleworth just sent over an email saying that they will be deploying the Wayland Display Server with their Unity Desktop -- that's replacing the GNOME Shell by default -- in a future Ubuntu release!

NVIDIA Continues Discussing Their Controversial Wayland Plans With Developers
Two weeks ago NVIDIA released their 364 Linux driver with initial support for Wayland and Mir. Some have asked why there aren't benchmarks yet or if GNOME 3.20 on Wayland supports the NVIDIA driver, but the short answer is the NVIDIA developers are still debating their implementation preferences with upstream Wayland developers.

VLC 4.0 Media Player Eyeing New User Interface, Better Wayland Support & VR/3D
It was nearly one year ago to the day that there was the huge VLC 3.0 feature release and while that was a great update to this open-source, cross-platform media player there is a lot more out on the horizon.
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About The Author
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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