The Wayland compositor API gives us a way to present the HVS to applications in a standards-based way. Over the last year we’ve been working with Collabora to implement a custom backend for the Weston reference compositor which uses the HVS to assemble the display. Last year we shipped a technology demonstration of this, and we’ve been working hard since then to improve its stability and performance.
The “missing piece” required before we can consider shipping a Wayland desktop as standard on the Pi is a graphical shell. This is the component that adds task launching and task switching on top of the raw compositor service provided by Wayland/Weston. The LXDE shell we ship with X on the Pi doesn’t support Wayland, while those shells that do (such as GNOME) are too heavyweight to run well on the Pi. We’ve therefore been working with Collabora since the start of the year to develop a lightweight Wayland shell, which we’ve christened Maynard (maintaining the tradition of New England placenames). While it’s some distance from being ready for the prime time, we though we’d share a preview so you can see where we’re going….
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