Hawaii

From phoronix.com:

The Hawaii Desktop is looking to be the very first Wayland-friendly desktop environment for Linux.
Warning: The Hawaii desktop environment has not reached its stable 1.0 release.

Installation

Install hawaii-meta-gitAUR from the Arch User Repository.

Make sure you also have weston installed.

Run with a graphical login manager

Login managers that support Wayland such as gdm can run a Hawaii session.

At the time of this writing, sddm doesn't support Wayland sessions.

Run from a tty

Log in to a tty and type:

$ starthawaii

The session manager automatically detects the hardware and will run the compositor accordingly.

With Qt 5.4 you are pretty much stuck with nested mode (Hawaii running full screen inside Weston) but Qt 5.5 will be the first release to ship with fully functional kms support.

This means that starting from Qt 5.5, the default mode will not require Weston anymore.

However the mode can be forced, for example to force nested mode:

$ starthawaii --mode=nested
Note: Do not use ~/.xinitrc to start hawaii. Xinit is commonly used to start Xorg, but hawaii uses Wayland, which is a newer graphical protocol.

Run with systemd user session

First you need to setup D-Bus with systemd user session as examplained on Systemd/User#D-Bus. Then enable the hawaii.service unit with:

$ systemctl --user enable hawaii.service

Every time you want to start a Hawaii session:

$ systemctl --user isolate hawaii.target

logind integration is know not to work with systemd user session at the moment, hence some features might not be working. systemd user session is pretty new and the developers are testing Hawaii with it.

Tips and tricks

Portable keybindings

To export your keyboard shortcut keys, you should do:

$ dconf dump /org/hawaii/desktop/keybindings/ > keybindings-backup.dconf

To later import it (for example) on another computer, do:

$ dconf load /org/hawaii/desktop/keybindings/ < keybindings-backup.dconf

See also