Wayland is now mostly usable, via backward compatability with the X protocol (XWayland). Native usability is mostly down to applications migrating to GTK3 and Qt5.
Version 0.99 was released on 2012-10-15, and was the last API break. Plans are to not break the API in the future. Latest version is 1.0.5.
XWayland has a segfault bug, and has not been committed upstream (to xorg).
Ubuntu, Fedora, and Gentoo now have the Wayland backend of GTK+ enabled.
Qt5 was released 2012-12-19, but I don't think there are any official distro packages of it yet.
Contents:The reference compositor (Weston) works with Intel, Radeon, and Nvidia (Nouveau) open source drivers. Nouveau on DRM requires kernel version 3.7-rc3.
XWayland, the ability to run X clients within Wayland, is mostly working. Firefox, chromium, and supertuxkart appear usable. There are DDXes for Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau (Nvidia). A software implementation exists but is more glitchy.
Clutter support is complete.
EFL support is complete except for selection.
Qt5 support is complete, including client side decorations (CSD).
GTK+ support is complete except for CSD, selections, dnd and popup placement, since v3.4.1, and added support for Wayland v1.0 in v3.6.3.
So any application should work natively with Wayland as long as it uses one of these four toolkits, and it doesn't call any Xlib functions. Unfortunately, a number of GTK+ applications do call Xlib, through gdk_x11_* functions, and they need to be wrapped in build-time and run-time backend checks.
And while GTK3 was released over a year ago, Qt5 had its first alpha release in April 2012, and its first Beta in August 2012. While many GTK+ applications haven't made the conversion yet, presumably Qt applications, for the most part, haven't started.
Perl GTK3 bindings exist. They have been packaged for Fedora.Firefox and chromium work via xwayland (backward compatability with the X protocol).
The only web browser I've tested that works natively is qtwebkit, which is included with the Qt5 source. Weston occasionally crashes when running it. The snowshoe browser also works with Qt5.
webkit-clutter apparently works on wayland
The webkitgtk browser doesn't work. As expected, the midori browser based on webkitgtk doesn't work.
Chrome / chromium may have worked, but Wayland support was completely removed on 2012-04-07. Yan Wang announced some work on it on 2012-05-04. Update 2012-06-06.
Opera hasn't started working on Wayland support yet.
weston-terminal is actually pretty decent.
vte, based on gtk, works fine.
Germinal works - VTE-based GTK+3 minimalistic terminal
Hawaii desktop terminal works with Qt5
I haven't tried clutterm, which uses Clutter, mostly because it says "This is a work in progress and it's far from ready for every day use."
QTerminal uses Qt, but is still using Qt4.
Terminology for EFL was started in June 2012. It probably works.
What works with Wayland? - list of applications that do and don't work.
Of the 22 gtk applications I tried (html5 theora video), 9 worked, and 13 didn't due to using Xlib calls. 41% worked (after I rebuilt GTK with --enable-wayland-backend).
(Libraries indicate Wayland backend is enabled.)
| Distro. | Release | Wayland | GTK+ | Qt | Clutter | COGL | EFL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arch | 1.0.5 | Yes | No | ? | ? | ? | |
| Fedora | Rawhide | 1.0.5 | Yes | No | ? | ? | ? |
| 18 | 1.0.3 | Yes | No | ? | ? | ? | |
| Gentoo | 1.0.4 | Yes | No | ? | ? | ? | |
| Exherbo | 1.0.5 | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | ? | |
| Debian | Experimental | 0.85 (update requested) | No | No | No | No | ? |
| Ubuntu (now with Amazon ads) |
Raring | 1.0.4 | Yes | No | No | ? | ? |
| Quantal | 0.95 | No | No | No | ? | ? | |
| Precise | 0.85 | No | No | No | ? | ? | |
| Maui | 1.0.4 | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
RebeccaBlackOS is a live ISO that includes Wayland. It's generally kept well up to date.
There is also a Fedora based Wayland Live CD.
A port to Android is in progress, by Pekka Paalanen, for Collabora.
KDE Plasma Workspaces (KWin) has "pre-alpha" Wayland support.
Mutter (GNOME Shell) seems to have some support in git branches, but little information available.
These have not seen work in a long time.
The protocol itself still needs work: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/tree/TODO
The Nvidia proprietary + cairo-gl problem:
Any one of these would've fixed the problem, the first one did:
Things I, personally, feel are most noticably missing.
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