Monthly Archives: January 2016

A Wayland status update

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Peter argues that the question “Is Wayland ready yet?” is not the best question to ask.  Then maybe this is a better question:

Is GNOME on Wayland ready yet ?

It has been our goal for a while to get to a point where the Wayland port can be declared complete and ready to be enabled by default. We’ve come a long way since we started the porting effort in September 2013. In fact, we feel that we’re close enough that we can  aim for Wayland by default in Fedora 24.

But the last mile is always the longest, and there’s still a few steps to take before we’re there.  With this weeks releases of Wayland 1.9.91 and the GNOME 3.19.4 releases, we’ve taken a couple of the steps:

  • A lot of work has gone into fixing the positioning of dialogs, menus and other popups in applications. When it was first introduced, the GTK+ Wayland backend was using heuristics based on window type hints for this; now we are more strict about it: just setting a transient parent should be enough to ensure proper placement. We also try to handle dialogs without transient parent as good as we can.
  • Kinetic scrolling now works as well under Wayland as under X11 – or even better (at least as far as the protocol is involved; Wayland has explicit support for this while we are relying on driver-specific heuristics under X). The relevant Wayland protocol additions needed  for this are the axis stop events.
  • Drag-and-Drop under Wayland is now comparable to X11. This is the culmination of multiple efforts:  The Wayland protocol gained some necessary dnd events and supports actions now.  On the GTK+ side, we’ve moved drag icon creation and input handling to the GDK backends, where it can be done in a backend-specific manner.

Whats next ?

  • We should see initial support for Wacom  tablets in Wayland 1.10.
  • A replacement for the X11 primary selection (“middle click paste”) is also in the works; I hope we can reach agreement on the protocol soon.
  • Inside GTK+, menu positioning is being reworked in a similar way to DND: Pushing it down to GDK, where it can be implemented in a backend-specific manner. This is being driven by the team working on the Mir backend, but it will benefit Wayland just as well.

And here is a sneak preview of Wayland remoting that Jonas has been working on for a while: