A Look At The Wayland/Weston Development Stats For 2018

This year was interesting for Wayland with the compositor support continuing to mature for both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, the smaller but very interesting i3-inspired Sway nearing its 1.0 release, NVIDIA working on EGLStreams support for the KWin compositor, and other advancements. But at the same time the year was unfortunate in that Samsung let go of their Wayland developers as part of their OSG restructuring, which had contributed heavily to the upstream project. Here's a look at Wayland/Weston 2018 by the numbers.

Wayland proper itself didn't see too much activity with the core Wayland itself being quite mature and the developers decided this year that it won't be tied to new Weston releases on their timed release cadence.

Wayland's Git repository saw just 70 commits so far this year compared to 78 the year prior and 150+ in the prior years going back to 2009. This year saw 792 new lines of code and 357 removed, a low point in the history of the project.

The most prolific Wayland contributor this year was Derek Foreman (Samsung) followed by Daniel Stone, Emil Velikov, Pekka Paalanen, Simon Ser, and Michal Srb. More of the Wayland data can be found via this GitStats output.

The Weston reference compositor is where more of the "magic" happens these days, besides all of the other desktop Wayland compositor implementations. But even on a commit basis, there were just 283 commits to Weston this year compared to 437 last year, and 600+ the prior years going back to 2010 when there were 248. There was just 9.6k lines of code added and 3.6k removed, the lowest point since 2009.

The most prolific Weston contributors this year were Pekka Paalanen of Collabora followed by Daniel Stone, Emre Ucan, Derek Foreman, Marius Vlad, and Alexandros Frantzis. Weston itself is up to 153,343 lines of code. More details on Weston's Git activity via this data.

Lastly, the most popular Wayland news in 2018 on Phoronix included:

EGLStreams XWayland Code Revised Ahead Of X.Org Server 1.20
It's still not clear if the EGLStreams XWayland support will be merged for xorg-server 1.20 but at least the patches were revised this week, making it possible to merge them into this next X.Org Server release for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland.

GNOME Shell vs. KDE Plasma Graphics Tests On Wayland vs. X.Org Server
A premium member this week had requested some benchmarks of openSUSE Tumbleweed when looking at the performance of KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell in some open-source graphics/gaming tests while also looking at the Wayland vs. X.Org Server performance.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Will Default To The X.Org Stack, Not Wayland
While Ubuntu 17.10 defaults to using the Wayland session on supported GPUs/drivers when using the default GNOME Shell based session, Canonical has decided for Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" LTS that it will use the X.Org Server by default.

Firefox 59 Might Ship With Working Wayland Support
Besides Firefox 59 being the release doing away with GTK2 support, this next Mozilla web-browser release might be the one to achieve working native Wayland support.

With Vulkan 1.1 It's Technically Possible To Write A Pure Wayland Compositor
With Vulkan 1.1 it should be technically possible to write a driver/vendor-agnostic Wayland compositor using Vulkan thanks to the new core extensions.

Wayland Remote Desktop May Come To Fedora 29
The latest feature plan for Fedora 29 is to finally have Wayland remote desktop support in place.

How To Make Use Of Wayland Screen Sharing With PipeWire & XDG Desktop Portal
A few days back we reported on the Red hat progress with supporting WebRTC-based screen-casting under Wayland that's working both for KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell. Given all the concerns over the years in supporting screen sharing / remote desktop under Wayland and the bits only coming together recently, Red Hat's Jan Grulich has offered up a guide.

NVIDIA Contributes EGLStreams Improvements For GNOME's Mutter Wayland Support
GNOME's Mutter Wayland compositor support is among the few Wayland implementations offering support for EGLStreams so it can play along with the approach used by the NVIDIA proprietary driver as an alternative to the GBM API used by the open-source graphics drivers. One of the NVIDIA engineers has just furthered along Mutter's EGLStreams support.

Red Hat Making Progress On KDE/GNOME Wayland Screen-Sharing With WebRTC
Jan Grulich and other developers at Red Hat have been making progress on screen-sharing support using WebRTC as found within web-browsers like Firefox and Chrome. With their experimental work, Wayland screen-sharing is working both for GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma.

Solus 4 To Offer Experimental GNOME Wayland Session, MATE UI Refresh
The Solus Linux distribution has offered up some new details this week on their upcoming Solus 4 release.