GNOME & Intel Developers Plan The Wayland Future

The GNOME annual developer conference, GUADEC, is beginning this week in the Czech Republic. At this GNOME-focused open-source event, the developers will be joined by Intel Wayland developers as they plot their eventual departure from the X.Org Server.

Similar to the KDE camp, the GNOME developers are committed to supporting Wayland as the next-generation Linux display server. There's already Wayland improvements in GNOME 3.10 and they intend to move at full-speed with Wayland.

The goal is with GNOME 3.10 in September to have X11 still be the default but where the GNOME Shell can function as a Wayland compositor and the GNOME stack begins to work for those wishing to run experiments and early testing on Wayland. By GNOME 3.12 in March of 2014, they hope that the complete port of GNOME to Wayland will be ready. Existing older applications will continue to be supported via XWayland. GNOME 3.12 would have a requirement that all core GNOME applications work with Wayland.

Red Hat's Christian Schaller has already blogged about GUADEC and Wayland with their plans for the week ahead. Christian writes, "One of the items I am looking the most forward to during this GUADEC to is to be able to talk our friends at Intel and figure out how we can effectively work together on Wayland. We have put together a team to accelerate Wayland development inside Red Hat, with the goal of getting it ready for deployment in Fedora. There are of course a lot of things that needs to happen in preparation for this, like getting the GNOME Shell ready to work as a Wayland compositor. We will be looking at a long range of items, but among the more important ones is dealing with input devices in Wayland, like handling multiple mice, touch or Wacom tablets and making sure XWayland works so well that our users will not need to realize they are using Wayland instead of X once we transition over."

The port of the GNOME desktop to Wayland within Red Hat's focus for Fedora is presently in planning for Fedora 21, the distribution's first release of 2014. Some early GNOME Wayland support could end up being found in Fedora 20 though. The Fedora Wayland planning is on this Wiki page.

Intel's Rob Bradford, who is one of the developers that has been working on Wayland, is also ready for GUADEC's Wayland focus. "This GUADEC there will be a couple of sessions on Friday afternoon from 2pm about Wayland. I’ll be giving a presentation with a brief introduction to what Wayland is, what new features we’ve worked on in the last cycle as well as what’s planned for the next one. As this is GUADEC i’ll of course be covering how we’re doing with getting Wayland integrated into GNOME. There will also be a Wayland panel discussion where you can ask your tricky questions of myself, Owen Taylor, Robert Bragg and Kristian Høgsberg – to get things started i’ve got some already prepared!"

Stay tuned for coverage on Phoronix after the GUADEC GNOME Wayland plans are devised.