Wayland 1.0 Officially Released

Wayland 1.0 along with the reference Weston 1.0 reference compositor were officially released on Monday.

Kristian Høgsberg after developing the project the past four years officially announced version 1.0 for Wayland. As described earlier on Phoronix, Wayland 1.0 doesn't mark the point that Wayland is complete and ready to replace the X11 Server as there's still a lot of work left to do but it marks the point at which there is API/protocol stability in terms of all future releases being backwards-compatible with the Wayland 1.0 release. Regardless of there being a lot of work left until Wayland is common to the Linux desktop, Wayland is exciting many users although it means real bad news for some users.

The guarantee of backwards compatibility will hopefully lead more application and tool-kit developers to port their software to Wayland. In recent times we have seen work on GTK+, Clutter, SDL, EFL, and Qt5 for Wayland plus various other work by Google Chromium, and other application developers to port their goods to this next-generation display architecture.

The release announcement, which is rather mundane for end-users, can be seen on the mailing list.

In terms of actual Wayland adoption, Ubuntu developers may try again to have Wayland become the Ubuntu System Compositor for Ubuntu 13.04 in April, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see that delayed until Ubuntu 13.10 one year from now. Wayland is making nice progress and it's becoming likely that it will succeed the X.Org Server on the modern Linux desktop, but there's still much work ahead. Even the Wayland adoption within Fedora and the other more experimental / bleeding-edge Linux distributions has been slow.

At least with X.Org Server 1.14 next March is where there will likely be XWayland integration for more easily running existing X11 clients/applications atop Wayland. We'll also see other Wayland work in other areas going forward.

So this just-released Wayland 1.0 release is nice in terms of hitting a major milestone, but for Linux desktop end-users there is still much work to be done before it will actually be part of a standard Linux desktop installation.