MeeGo-Successor Tizen Is Not On Wayland Yet

One of the first areas I looked at when the initial Tizen source-code and SDK were released this week was whether the Wayland Display Server is yet playing any role in this HTML5-focused Linux distribution being led by Intel, Samsung, and other industry leaders.

When Intel was still behind MeeGo, they were making plans to deploy MeeGo Tablet UX with Wayland in 2011 along with other ambitions. Nokia had developers working on Wayland support too (many of them found their way to Intel after Nokia became a Microsoft outfit). Intel is still investing heavily in Wayland with their engineering team and other initiatives, but it doesn't look like the first Tizen release in H1'2012 will rely upon the experimental next-generation display server.

Within the Tizen source-code that's available now, the X.Org packages are there but Wayland is not. The Tizen source can be viewed from this page. (Then again, it's not complete yet with their X.Org Server Git repository being empty, there being no Mesa repository at all, etc.) If searching for Wayland on Tizen.org, there are plenty of hits, but not any code and more just IRC chat and discussions.

MeeGo had relied heavily upon the Qt tool-kit, which has growing Wayland support (some applications are running) and should be in good shape with Qt 5.0 thanks to the Lighthouse project / platform abstraction. With Tizen they are using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). There is Enlightenment porting to Wayland, but that too is still an active work-in-progress. (GTK+ and Clutter have also received recent updates to improve their Wayland support.)

I can't say I am surprised that Wayland isn't yet found in use by the Tizen project, considering that Wayland still has a ways to go before it's a viable replacement to X.Org, but it will be interesting to see their transition process and just how quickly it evolves.

Meanwhile we should hear much more about Wayland and its near future plans at FOSDEM 2012. Some of its recent achievements include Weston, sprite support, full-screen mode-setting, multi-touch, triple buffering, and a working screensaver implementation.