Fedora 21 May Get Wayland Display Server Default

Fedora developers have submitted a proposal to include the still under construction Wayland display server as standard in the upcoming Fedora 21 desktop based on Gnome 3.14.

The proposal has been submitted to the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee. While Fedora 21, due for release in October, should still include X.org Server code for compatibility reasons, the developers plan to deploy Wayland as the default display server. This must be done in conjunction with the developers of Gnome. With the construction of Gnome 3.14, they are already well on their way to running this desktop environment on top of Wayland.

Wayland has since arrived at version 1.6. Yet there are still few major Linux distributions that dare to make the switch. However, Fedora 20 already had a preview version of Wayland, which allowed developers to gain experience with the new composer.

If the proposal is approved and Fedora 21 actually comes standard with Wayland and Gnome 3.14, display server adoption could accelerate. The biggest competitor at the moment is Mir, Canonical’s display server that should eventually be standard in Ubuntu.