So our team here at Red Hat have been working intensively with our counterparts at Intel to merge and stabilize the patches to enable Wayland support in GNOME and at the same time looking into what further improvements are needed in the stack. Enabling Wayland support means essentially turning the GNOME Shell into a Wayland compositor as we are not going to be using the sample compositor Weston. Porting to Wayland isn’t just about replacing X calls with Wayland calls, in many cases there is also functionality that was in X that will be done as a separate library for use with Wayland or settings that used to be handled by X that now needs to be stored elsewhere. The development work is starting to come together now and tarballs are being released with initial Wayland support or core modules such as Mutter.

The goal we are still pursuing is to have a tech preview ready for Fedora 20. So what do we mean with a tech preview? Well there will be a quite a few things missing or maybe not working as expected. What we hope to have ready is a system where you can have the option of a Wayland session available in GDM, so that instead of logging into your normal X based session you log into one running Wayland instead. Once in that session you should be able to launch and run some applications, but stability is likely to not be great and we don’t know how well XWayland will work by then, so you will also likely having limited mileage with applications that still rely on X. The goal for the tech preview is not to create something an end user is likely to find very useful, rather it is about lowering the barrier for developers and contributors to get involved and start preparing for the Wayland future.

But we do think that it will at least be in a state where developers can easily start playing with it and where the community can help us find issues and bugs, so that we can reach our goal of having a full featured and stable GNOME running on Wayland ready for Fedora 21.

As a sidenote, our top priority is to make sure that the transition from X to Wayland becomes something an end users doesn’t really need to care about. So the final switch to Wayland over X will only happen once we are as sure as we can be that our users will not be negatively affected by the change. So if we default to Wayland or X for Fedora 21 is still an open question, we hope to default to Wayland of course, but staying with X as the default for one more release is not considered unreasonable if it will help us ensure a smooth transition experience for us users. We have of course also not forgotten that many of our users use the binary graphics drivers so we are working on making sure we have an answer ready for that going forward.

You can find details on the status of the tech preview if you go to this website.