Maynard is like Gnome shell's little brother, or in our case, lighter brother. It's made up from the same toolkit - GTK, however, it is and always will be lighter than Gnome.
When Collabora and the
Raspberry Pi Foundation have decided they want to make Wayland usable on Raspberry Pi, they've encountered a minor issue.
They needed a lightweight desktop environment which could run on the Pi and at the same time to also support the new display server protocol - Wayland.
Since there wasn't any available instance who matched both features alike, they had no other choice but to create one themselves, and that's how Maynard was born.
Maynard's goals are:
- To be functional.
- To be lightweight.
- To be pretty.
Conversely, its limitations are:
according to Marco Barisione’s Weblog
- No XWayland support, thus 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).
Although the project is very unique in its own right, it also reminds me of another project called
Maui OS which has a custom designed graphical environment called Hawaii also built for
Wayland.
If you'd like to know more about the project and how to get it installed then check out its wiki-page on
Github.
Finally, the video below will get you a glimpse of the current state at which Maynard is at;
