Differences Between X.Org, Wayland & Mir

Canonical's Christopher Halse Rogers has blogged some more about their views on the Mir Display Server and its design relative to X11/X.Org and Wayland.

Rogers has already written a lot about Mir in Canonical's attempt to promote the Wayland alternative and their views for designing it rather than using Wayland or forking it.

His latest blog post on the matter is Wayland, Mir, and X - different projects. Key points include:

- Google Protobuf is used as the IPC (Inter-Process Communication) method for Mir. ProtoBuf is short for Protocol Buffers and is Google's data interchange format.

- "Where the Wayland libraries are all about IPC, Mir is about producing a library to do the drudge work of a display-server-compositor-thing, so in this way it's more like Xorg than Wayland. In fact, it's a bit more specific - Mir is about creating a library to make the most awesome Unity display-server-compositor-thingy. We're not aiming to satisfy anyone's requirements but our own. That said, our requirements aren't likely to be hugely specific, so Mir will likely be generally useful."

- "Perhaps we'll become so awesome that it'll make sense for GNOME or KDE to rebase their compositors on Mir, but that's a long way away."