Master thesis : Integrating Wayland with Flutter

Abstract

Zenith is a Wayland compositor for Linux mobile devices. It is a user interface designed to run on smartphones running regular Linux distributions. By combining emergent technologies like Wayland and Flutter, we can provide a look-and-feel that competes with Android and iOS. Linux mobile devices are slowly on the rise. There is a desire to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile Linux and provide a user experience on par with popular mobile operating systems.

The idea for this project came to me when I tried other open-source mobile compositors created with GTK and Qt and realized that basic features like scrolling felt unnatural. Knowing that Flutter was designed from the ground up with mobile devices in mind, I thought it would be a great idea to create a mobile user interface using this UI framework.

In this thesis, a free and open-source prototype of a mobile compositor was implemented, explaining the steps taken to integrate Flutter and Wayland to create a touch-friendly user interface that can be also run on the desktop platform. Documentation on this topic is very scarce, and this thesis will also go through the technical challenges and solutions that I encountered while integrating these two technologies.

As a result of my work, other open-source projects are now interested and have started integrating my implementation of this technology stack into their projects.