As we are approaching Fedora Workstation 21 we held a meeting to review our Wayland efforts for Fedora Workstation inside Red Hat recently. Switching to a new core technology like Wayland is a major undertaking and there are always big and small surprises that comes along the way. So the summary is that while we expect to have a version of Wayland in Fedora Workstation 21 that will be able to run a fully functional desktop, there are some missing pieces we now know that will not make it. Which means that since we want to ship at least one Fedora release with a feature complete Wayland as an option before making it default, that means that Fedora Workstation 23 is the earliest Wayland can be the default.

Anyway, here is what you can expect from Wayland in Fedora 21.

Wayland session available in GDM (already complete and fully working)

XWayland working, but without accelerated 3D (done, adding accelerated 3D will be done before FW 22)

Wayland session working with all free drivers (Currently only Intel working, but we expect to have NVidia and AMD support enabled before F21)

IBUS input working. (Using the IBUS X client. Wayland native IBUS should be ready for FW22.)

Touchpad acceleration working. (Last missing piece for a truly usable Wayland session, lots of work around libinput and friends currently to have it ready for F21).

Wacom tablets will not be ready for F21

3D games should work using the Wayland backend for SDL2. SDL1 games will need to wait for FW22 so they can use the accelerated XWayland support).

Binary driver support from NVidia and AMD very unlikely to be ready for F21.

Touch screen support working under Wayland.

We hope to have F21 testbuilds available soon that the wider community can use to help us test, because even when all the big ‘checkboxes’ are filled in there will of course be a host of smaller issues and outright bugs that needs ironing out before Wayland is ready to replace X completely. We really hope the community will get involved with testing Wayland so that we can iron out all major bugs before F21.

How to get involved with the Fedora Workstaton effort



To help more people get involved we recently put up a tasklist for the Fedora Workstation. It is a work in progress, but we hope that it will help more people get involved and help move the project forward.

UpdatePeter Hutterer posted this blog entry explaining pointer acceleration and what are looking at to improve it.