The main thing is that Wayland just drops all backwards compatibility and requires modern driver/kernel features in order to minimize the amount of code required. The result is a lighter program that integrates better into current technologies.
As far as being usable, I'd say it's not that far away for mobile devices running Meego, for example. But I doubt it will be seen anywhere on the desktop for quite a while. Dropping backwards compatibility there is a big deal, and not something that can just be done without lots of planning and a roadmap. Just for starters, they'd probably want to wait for NVidia and AMD to release binary drivers that would be compatible with it (Meego will likely only ship with Intel chips). The Qt/GTK toolkits need more time to finish getting ported/stabilized. Apps like Firefox that use some X-server API's directly need to be ported. Someone will need to figure out how remote desktop should work (embedding an x-server? VNC? A new protocol, possibly added into Wayland?) All of those things could take a while to fully finish, and most of them haven't really even started yet except for the toolkit porting.
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Patches So Nouveau Users Can Try Out Wayland
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also Kristian posted this:
Quite a few things have happened since the last update, so I'm overdue
for a blog entry update on the project. We're now running on all
upstream software, no personal branches necessary, we have an X11
compositor, we have a multi-pointer, input redirection aware DnD
protocol, we can set cursor images, we have a SHM buffer transport
mechanism. We have fairly complete gtk+ and Qt ports, there's wayland
backend in the clutter project, we're using libxkbcommon for keyboard
layouts. We have a logo!
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Originally posted by oliw View PostI know it's still relatively young but I still don't understand why anybody would want to run Wayland. What is it's aim? How long is it from being usable?
Visual quality: Wayland can archive better quality, better on animation and tearing.
Lighter: Wayland is lighter on resources, doesn't implement as much functionality as X-server. Much of this extra functionality in x-server is not used any longer by modern toolkits like QT or GTK+, but has to be supplied for backwards compatibility.
I think also Wayland integrates better with technology like OpenGL and Cario.
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I know it's still relatively young but I still don't understand why anybody would want to run Wayland. What is it's aim? How long is it from being usable?
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Patches So Nouveau Users Can Try Out Wayland
Phoronix: Patches So Nouveau Users Can Try Out Wayland
Chia-I Wu, the open-source developer who previously worked to bring Mesa to Android devices and worked on the new EGL state tracker, is now working for LunarG and has just published a patch-set that enables the Nouveau graphics driver to run the Wayland Display Server...
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