Update on Wayland support in Fedora

Fedora developer Christian Schaller recently posted an update on the state of Wayland in Fedora Workstation, and it is looking promising.

One of the newest features outlined by Christian that is in the works for Fedora (and could appear in Fedora 24) is the ability to properly use two or more monitors with vastly different DPIs. This means that if you have a High DPI monitor and a standard DPI monitor the window and text sizes will no longer be tiny (or large) on one monitor and not the other. When dragging windows between the monitors the window will automatically scale to work with the DPI of the screen they are on.

There has also been a lot of work done by Fedora (and upstream) Developers to get some of the biggest applications ported to GTK+3 so they work natively with GNOME on Wayland. Caolan McNamara has finished porting LibreOffice to the GTK+3 toolkit and this work should be available in Fedora Workstation 23 as an option, with the goal of the GTK3 version being the default in Fedora 24. Martin Stransky is working on making Firefox run on Wayland with the basic GTK+3 port of Firefox completed.

Since Fedora 21, it has been possible to use Wayland on GNOME by logging into the GNOME on Wayland session from the Fedora Workstation login screen. The login screen itself is also runs on Wayland by default since Fedora 22.

UPDATE: This article previously stated that the High DPI on multi monitors was slated for release in Fedora 23 — however this is looking more likely for a Fedora 24 release.

Fedora Project community

7 Comments

  1. Leslie Satenstein

    Hi Ryan
    I am quite excited to read the progress report for Wayland, and about the programs that are being recoded so that they can be integrated with Wayland. Hopefully soon, these programs may be able to use any new features in Wayland that may help to make the converted program have a richer functionality.

    I am anxious to test a new nautilus under Wayland. My comparison is to compare nautilus as it works in Fedora 21 with the current Fedora 22 and with Fedora23 versions. The Fedora 23 nautilus’s lack of stability and functionality is deterring me from continuing further Fedora 23 testing.

    It would be wonderful to know when the next RC candidate is made available. The very limited testing I did looks most promising.

  2. Some time ago I recorded demo of Fedora 22 with GNOME 3.16 on Wayland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8dR8azaSEs

    And LibreOffice 5 on Wayland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aew67AH0G1o

    Great progress! Waiting for Fedora 24.

  3. Marko

    So with last laptop that i got to fix and reinstall operating system i had this problem. I flashed XP and installed Elementary OS but client was not happy because he was using laptop with his big screen TV. I came to his house and configured it so that he have normal picture on TV but square on laptop.

  4. I left a comment (currently in the moderation queue) on Christian’s blog to clarify this, but I’m going to leave one here as well: the multi DPI set up is not merged, and won’t likely be ready for Fedora 23. There are lots of moving pieces in the toolkit and the compositor, and the patches haven’t been fully completed, let alone reviewed.

    If everything goes according to plan, multi DPI should land early in the GNOME 3.20 development cycle, and be available next year — in time for Fedora 24.

  5. Egor Zaharov

    I just hope this will be fixed until Fedora 23 got released.

  6. msx

    Great news, thanks for keeping us updated!

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