Where Wayland May First Appear In Use By A Distro

Yesterday there was a gathering for a few hours among X.Org developers for those who arrived early into Toulouse. There were a number of topics discussed over those few hours while drinking Paulaner (though unfortunately, no interviews were yet recorded), including Wayland with Kristian Høgsberg.

Kristian mentioned the recent milestones like being able to run Wayland from mainline components (kernel, Mesa, etc), the GTK3 support for Wayland being in rather good shape, the Qt tool-kit support for Wayland continuing to move along, his recent Wayland work, etc. A few interesting bits of information though was shared, perhaps most interestingly though was where Wayland will likely be deployed first.

It turns out that Wayland may end up finding itself deployed within MeeGo Touch. In fact, it sounds like there is already a prototype of MeeGo Touch + Wayland done by Kristian at Intel. Though this isn't to be confused with the MeeGo netbook edition or even Nokia's version of MeeGo Touch for their hand-held devices as they have the decision of using Wayland or continuing to run an X.Org Server.

It actually would be nice to see Wayland deployed initially within MeeGo Touch and it makes quite a bit of sense. MeeGo Touch really doesn't need to worry about supporting any legacy applications as most of their applications are MeeGo-specific and written in Qt. The Wayland Qt work sounds quite promising and even Qt's multi-touch implementation by hooking into the kernel should be working with Wayland. Besides the smaller range of supported applications that need to be running under Wayland (so you don't need to run an X Server under Wayland), there is a limited range of devices initially that are supported by Wayland so it's less of a burden in making sure the hardware devices are compatible in terms of using kernel mode-setting and other technologies that are required by this lightweight display server.

Most other Linux-based mobile phone operating systems also don't run an X.Org Server like Android and WebOS. No definitive time-line is known for when Wayland could replace the X.Org Server in MeeGo Touch, but first of course the Qt-Wayland compatibility work needs to be finished so everything can be all plugged together. There's also other features within Wayland to finish (see the TODO list), but it's promising to know that it may soon be finding its first proper deployment.