Red Hat and Intel developers are now working closely together to bring Wayland support in GNOME and they are hoping it’s going to be ready to ship in Fedora 21.

The Ubuntu secret plan to conquer the FOSS world has been foiled by Intel with its announcement, at least for now, but the true plans of the Intel developers have been revealed.

If we remove the drama, it’s actually not a secret that Intel has invested heavily in Wayland’s future. Its developers are now working closely with Red Hat to make the GNOME Shell act as a compositor.

“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,” stated Red Hat’s Christian Schaller on his personal blog.

It seems that the goal of the team is now to provide a tech preview ready for Fedora 20, which will have to be enough, at least for the time being. It’s not going to be quite a working project, but at least it will give people an idea of what they should expect.

It’s unclear if this particular timing has anything to do with Canonical’s haste to provide a fully working Mir display server in their upcoming Ubuntu 13.10, which is scheduled for release in October.

“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,” also said Schaller in his blog post.

This “war” between display servers might have a clear winner, and that is the end user. Both teams, Intel and Canonical, now have better incentives to provide a better experience and no matter who wins, we will reap the fruits of their labor.