GNOME / Wayland plans

In the interest of transparency (and for the benefit of Kristian, who had to leave before the BoF), I’ll quickly summarize the main decisions that were reached at the Guadec Wayland BoF today.

  • We are planning to have a tech preview of GNOME shell as a Wayland compositor in 3.10
  • GNOME shell will run on KMS, not just nested
  • We will keep the Wayland port of mutter on a branch for now
  • gnome-shell will build two binaries, for the X and Wayland compositor
  • Display configuration will work
  • In 3.10, we’ll keep input methods working as before, with client-side IBus. We will switch to using the Wayland text protocol and server-side IBus next cycle.
  • We may not get gdm to launch the tech preview, and fall back to launching the shell manually from a vt

For more details, see the feature page. That page also has a list of anticipated limitations of the tech preview.

19 thoughts on “GNOME / Wayland plans”

    1. “BoF stands for “Birds of a Feather”, as in a saying “birds of a feather flock together”, which means a working discussion about a specific topic of interest in a group of people who share that interest.”

      From the gnome wiki.

    2. I believe it’s “Birds of Feather”, smaler group talks, planning or something within scheduled times of bigger events. People suggest themes, everyone subscribes, few themes are picked and sessions have their schedule for bof session.

  1. Will this work make it easier to port Gnome based GNU/Linux to tablets? Thank-you.

  2. Regarding input – do I understand correctly that the current plan is to copy all the evdev-related code from weston to the KMS port of GNOME shell? Then, who will be responsible for keeping the two copies in sync?

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