Hello Linux Geeksters. It’s official. Fedora 21, using GNOME 3.14 (scheduled for release on September 2014) will be the first Linux system to use the Wayland system compositor as default, instead of the good old X11 server. The Fedora developers have approved the change yesterday at their FESCo meeting.

As you may know, Wayland is a new system compositor created by the Red Hat developers and sponsored by Intel and Samsung, among others. It is also used on mobile devices, the Jolla phone being the first to be powered by Wayland.

Before deciding to create Mir, Canonical also intended to use Wayland on their new Ubuntu desktop and mobile systems.

While the initial plans were to have official Wayland support starting with GNOME 3.12, this was rescheduled for GNOME 3.14. According to this wiki, an experimental version of Wayland for Gnome Shell will be available for Fedora 20, the gnome-shell shipping with mutter in two versions, one for the X compositor and one for Wayland (this happened also with Gnome Shell 3.12).

Also Wayland is under massive works, the latest version available being Wayland 1.5 RC, while the stable version of Wayland 1.5 (and Weston 1.5) will be released this week.

To test Fedora running on Wayland, install Fedora Rawhide (testing) in a virtual machine. While it already uses the under-development version of GNOME 3.14 (for now GNOME 3.13.1), it will be also the first Fedora system to receive the Wayland Gnome improvements.