Ubuntu Is Going To Deploy Wayland With Unity

[zoomblab]

In short, windowing systems designed to allow distributed operation where the application does not necessarily run on the desktop are demonstrably architecturally flawed - they cannot exploit modern graphics hardware.

Gosling's highlights this increasing unsuitability of an X11-style architecture in a paper in which he outlines how he would design a windowing system if he were starting from scratch today. The most striking feature of Gosling's proposal is how low level it is:

"make the 'window system' so minimal that it is almost non-existent."

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblo...goslingwindows

[zoomblab]

I certainly hope they make the switch before 12.10.

X server is architecturally flawed. Wayland is the future.

[RealNC]

Good news actually. Wayland needed a push by a major player. Though I guess the decision might not be really final yet.

[portets43]

smells like ubuntu's trying to steal the show with a unity-compiz-wayland thingymajig.

i don't know.... it just seems like canonical is trying to monopolize the open source world. which isn't nearly as bad as closed big business monopolization. at least they're trying to use and advance new technologies while bringing in new linux users.

anyway, go wayland!

[Decatf]

Nice to see someone trying to push vendors to something rather than lay there and take it up the ass.

[ethana2]

What about the MASSIVE performance problems this will cause. The opensource drivers are slow, and the proprietary ones don't work. Also, won't this compositing cause a massive drop in performance?

In and of itself, Wayland will perform a ton better than X11. I'm running compiz on nouveau right now, it's performant *enough* for me. By the time Canonical actually does this, Free drivers will be a lot faster.

If an application is using the x11 screensaver thing to tell if a user went away, yes, that is improperly written-- but that may be a fault of GTK or Qt that the application developer will catch the consequences for. Is that seriously the only way to query how long the user has been away? What does Empathy use?

[steverweber]

glad to see a big player stepping up and pushing the opensource movement where its needed. I for one don't give a dam if we break compatible, since the outcome will likely be a far more streamlined solution.

[LinuxID10T]

What about the MASSIVE performance problems this will cause. The opensource drivers are slow, and the proprietary ones don't work. Also, won't this compositing cause a massive drop in performance?

[Plombo]

Yeah I wonder on that too.
X is not that bad, despite so many bad comments.
Also what would be interesting is how much software would break with a transition.

Unless I'm mistaken, the plan (at least initially) is to use Wayland as a backend for the X server, in which case hardly any software would break.

[Delgarde]

Only software that's not properly written

Define 'properly'. Certainly, the average application should be unaffected, if it uses a standard toolkit like Qt or Gtk, and uses *only* that toolkit. But what if it needs to do something clever? Is the chat client "not properly written" because it uses the standard X screen saver API to recognise when the user is away from the keyboard?