Wayland's Weston Lands In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Landing today within Ubuntu's 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" repository is Weston, the reference compositor for the Wayland Display Server. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS won't have a full-on Wayland preview as was originally hoped for last November.

Following a sync from Debian, landing today was the Weston package as the reference compositor to Wayland. This sync was the initial Weston 0.85 release. The Wayland/Weston 0.85 release was made in early February in preparation for a stable Wayland 1.0 release later in 2012. Wayland 0.85 itself has already been available in the Ubuntu "Precise" repository.

While this may seem good, the disappointing part is that -- as of right now -- the GTK+ build is likely not to support Wayland. Since the GTK+ Wayland work was merged following the Ubuntu 12.04 feature freeze, the Ubuntu developers don't want to pass enabling the --enable-wayland-backend option for having the dynamic Wayland back-end to the GTK+ tool-kit. This will present several applications from running on Wayland.

This Ubuntu 12.04 Wayland issue was expressed today on the Wayland mailing list. That mailing list post also has updates on the state of Wayland ports for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome/Chromium. Google's Chromium OS platform is also now successful in some level of Wayland support.

If you're interested in Wayland on Ubuntu Linux as a replacement to an X.Org Server, you'll be better off waiting for Ubuntu 12.10 or more likely will be Ubuntu 13.04.