Ubuntu 13.04 Will Enable Wayland Support In GTK+

[plonoma]

Then GTK should get some restructuring.
Seriously backends not optionally choosable? That's one of the most basic things you need in a toolkit like GTK to be adaptable to it's platform.

[Darxus]

Then GTK should get some restructuring.

Yes. Please fix it.

Seriously backends not optionally choosable? That's one of the most basic things you need in a toolkit like GTK to be adaptable to it's platform.

They're optional at build time. Just not at run time.

[Figueiredo]

As a layman in the subject, I am curious as to how much of a "pure wayland" experience can we expect out of 13.04. Is it going to be defaut for everyone with the required specs, or will some hacking be required in order to play with it?

Maybe it's all up to X actually supporting wayland. I suspect that it the missing link righ now right? When that happens, wayland will be the defaut back-end, and when an app not yet ported to wayland is opend, an X server will be loaded for it in a transparent manner?

[Darxus]

As a layman in the subject, I am curious as to how much of a "pure wayland" experience can we expect out fo 13.04. Is it going to be defaut for everyone with the required specs, or will some hacking be required in order to play with it?

I expect that it will not be default for anyone. You would run weston (under X) or weston-launch (outside X), and then you could run applications under it. You would be limited to gtk applications which work - some of them don't. Because the X client backward compatibility will not be included (due to not being upstream), and I think the qt5 stuff will not be packaged. So, very limited usability.

[newwen]

Does the latest version of weston support multiple monitors? I heard that it would handle multiple monitors in a different way than Xorg's RandR

[Darxus]

Does the latest version of weston support multiple monitors? I heard that it would handle multiple monitors in a different way than Xorg

Yes, by default you get a desktop on the multiple connected monitors.

[johnc]

Why do I feel the need to take a 2-yr break from Linux once the Wayland transition really gets going?

[pingufunkybeat]

Why do I feel the need to take a 2-yr break from Linux once the Wayland transition really gets going?

You don't. X will still be there, working just as well

[uid313]

Why do I feel the need to take a 2-yr break from Linux once the Wayland transition really gets going?

Not all Linux distributions will suddenly all jump at Wayland.
So if the distribution you use decide to switch to Wayland, well then you can configure it to use X.org, or you can switch to a distribution that doesn't use Wayland.

[Delgarde]

Then GTK should get some restructuring.
Seriously backends not optionally choosable? That's one of the most basic things you need in a toolkit like GTK to be adaptable to it's platform.

It's choosable at build time - e.g for building the libraries to run on Windows, MacOS, Unix/X, etc. And it's choosable at runtime which backend is used, if multiple backend exist (e.g Wayland and X).

The catch is that while backends are chosen dynamically, they're not (yet) loaded that way. Thus, the gtk libraries will be linked to both X and Wayland libraries, and both sets of libraries will be dragged into memory when the process is loaded.

Basically, it's a transitional problem. Until Wayland, there was never a need for supporting multiple backends at runtime, so the support for doing so is a work in progress. (EDIT: though as the bug someone linked to indicates, fixing GTK to dynamically load the backend would be a major effort. Don't expect it to happen soon)