In the last year or so, Collabora has been working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on a web browser and on Wayland. See Daniel’s and Pekka’s blog posts about their Wayland work.

To make Wayland on the Raspberry Pi actually usable, we needed a shell, but lightweight desktop environments (like LXDE) don’t support Wayland and normal desktops (like Gnome and KDE) are just too heavy.
This meant we ended up writing our own shell based on Tiago Vignatti’s gtk-shell, so Maynard was born!

Maynard running on my laptop (webm video file)

Maynard running on a Pi (mp4 video file)

Maynard is far from complete, but it’s already starting to take shape nicely. Its goals are to be functional, light and pretty, so it will never see some of the features one might expect from Gnome or KDE for instance.

The main current limitations are:

• No XWayland support, so non-Wayland applications cannot run (issue #1).
• GTK applications take too long to start (issue #2).
• Active apps are not shown in the panel (issue #3).
• No configurability (issue #7). I hope you like the background from kdewallpapers we use as you cannot change it for now 😉

Interested in the project? Follow these links:

• Packages for Raspbian
• Wiki page with compilation instructions
• Git repository