A Wayland status update

6 Comments

It has been a while since I last  wrote about the GNOME Wayland port; time for another status update of GNOME 3.14 on Wayland.

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So, what have we achieved this cycle ?

  • Keyboard layouts are supported
  • Drag-and-Drop works (with limitations)
  • Touch is supported

The list of applications that work ‘natively’ (ie with the GTK+ Wayland backend) is looking pretty good, too.  The main straggler here is totem, where we are debugging some issues with the use of subsurfaces in clutter-gtk.

We are homing in on ‘day-to-day usable’.  I would love to say the Wayland session is “rock-solid”, but I just spent an hour trying to track track down an ugly memory leak that ended my session rather quickly. So, we are not quite there yet, and more work is needed.

If you are interested in helping us complete the port and take advantage of Wayland going forward, there is an opening in the desktop team at Red Hat for a Wayland developer.

Update: After a bit of collective head-scratching, Jasper fixed the memory leak here.

6 thoughts on “A Wayland status update”

  1. Thanks for the update. Keep up the good work and hope it all works out well soon. Eager to see a polished desktop that runs seamlessly on Wayland. 🙂
    (Am just an average Linux user here…)

  2. How keyboard layouts are supported ?
    AFAIK in X its through xkeyboard-config.

    What about changing keymaps in a layout ?
    At the moment I’m very annoyed with X as:
    * A keymap set with xmodmap will purged when switching between layouts.
    * Virtual keyboard solutions (e.g. xvkbd + xbindkeys) didn’t worked well with some GTK apps like Epiphany and Nautilus.
    So the only solution I considered viable is to patch xkeyboard-config but as Gnome 3.14 is close (I’m on Arch) I didn’t saw a reason to waste time on it as I’ll move to Wayland.

  4. I would like to comment about keyboard layouts and internationalization.

    I believe that the number of countries following keyboard layout that is pc104 are few (eg. USA).

    Many if not most countries use keyboard that follow pc105 layout. The pc105 contains an extra keytop to the left of the Z key (Look at a physical latam or French Canada or other language layout). The images shown by Gnome are assuming all layouts are pc104.

    It appears recently that the French Canadian Layout is standardizing on placing the Euro symbol (€) on the E key at level 3, joining the latam keyboard layout that already does that. Microsoft W8 does that and provides support for the pc105 layout for Canada. (Love the «quotes» in lieu of “quotes”

    So whats the deal? Well, the question is “Should the on screen keyboard layout” match the current keyboard setting?”

    If this keyboard layout topic is to be revisited, can provisions be made for the Yen symbol (¥). It is in use in Japan, China, and is in common use world wide. As a suggestion, “¥” could be assigned to the Y key at level 3.

  5. Nice work, but unfortunately moot. Before ssh -X works no one serious is going to use Wayland for a distribution default. Because there doesn’t seem to ne any movement on that area it will take 5+ years before the basic requirements will be met.

    My point is that no one besides couple hc nerds will ever see Gnome on wayshit.

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