X.Org 7.8 Isn't Actively Being Pursued

[garegin]

On the opposite hand, I do hate naysayers that claim that wayland is a pie in the sky. I mean, really?! Pie in the sky? We have demos running and both Gnome and KDE and about ready.

[alanc]

shelf all X development permanently while in the meantime they refocus on getting X working flawlessly on XWayland

I don't know why I even bother explaining things when people hallucinate to think the complete opposite to be true.

A year or so from now, we'll be enjoying the god of the desktop and the server - Linux and Wayland

"Timeframes are difficult. I?m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic"
- Mark Shuttleworth, Unity on Wayland, November 4, 2010

[Marc Driftmeyer]

No... No they won't take years and years, unlike the Qt3->Qt4 switchover Qt5 is mostly source compatible with Qt4, and there's plenty of instances where to port you only need to recompile the code to make it use Qt5. The real issue and work is KF5 because a lot of the KDE libraries are/have been merged into Qt5, and KDE applications need a KF5 release unless they want to port to using pure Qt (which would be a lot of work), before they can go to using Qt5. So no Qt5 is not the porting issue, KF5 is, but I don't really expect it'll take that long for everything to port a year or two max once KF5 is released, for applications that are waiting until a release to start that work.

And for those interested in the KDE 5 Frameworks status:

http://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Epics

[MartinN]

great progress

This is great news all over - the X team will probably pick a stable (enough) release for X11, patch it up enough to hopefully not have any major holes/showstoppers in it, and shelf all X development permanently while in the meantime they refocus on getting X working flawlessly on XWayland - and I'm sure they won't mind if Canonical borrows their work there too for XMir . I think that's pretty much it for the X and XWayland effort ... the rest of the work will fall on the hands of the KDE/KWin and Gnome shell folks whom will be probably all too happy to get Wayland as a baseline instead of a 30 year old legacy. While at it, I'd borrow any and all usable X code, at least conceptually if not direct code ripping, and use that to aid Wayland in whatever might be missing, maybe input handling or what not, I haven't been monitoring the Wayland issues or its mailing list lately....

A year or so from now, we'll be enjoying the god of the desktop and the server - Linux and Wayland with its gnomes, kwins, etc - all usable, snappy, fast and pretty looking

[Luke_Wolf]

how so. they would have to port everything to qt5, which will take years. until then its xwayland.

No... No they won't take years and years, unlike the Qt3->Qt4 switchover Qt5 is mostly source compatible with Qt4, and there's plenty of instances where to port you only need to recompile the code to make it use Qt5. The real issue and work is KF5 because a lot of the KDE libraries are/have been merged into Qt5, and KDE applications need a KF5 release unless they want to port to using pure Qt (which would be a lot of work), before they can go to using Qt5. So no Qt5 is not the porting issue, KF5 is, but I don't really expect it'll take that long for everything to port a year or two max once KF5 is released, for applications that are waiting until a release to start that work.

[GreatEmerald]

Hah, that's about what I expected. The X katamari versions have been following a typical square-root curve up to now (I had a graph made for that somewhere), and it seems that the trend is not going to change any time soon.

EDIT: Ah, there we go:

that depends on how long it would take for everyone to port their stuff to gtk3 or qt5. my estimation is that it would years upon years. and that means having a crappy x stack running inside wayland or making x better.

You can't make X that much better at this point. That's the major reason why Wayland exists, after all.

[garegin]

KDE should run perfectly fine without X in upcoming months. .

how so. they would have to port everything to qt5, which will take years. until then its xwayland.

[Ericg]

VCL, not VLC. VCL is the toolkit used by LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

Fixed that for you

[Awesomeness]

Apps like Firefox and Libre/Open Office will be a problem as firefox still uses GTK2 on LInux and as VCL isn't wayland ready.

So QupZilla and Calligra will be happy about this.

does the linux version of vlc use qt4?

VCL, not VLC. VLC is the toolkit used by LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

that depends on how long it would take for everyone to port their stuff to gtk3 or qt5. my estimation is that it would years upon years. and that means having a crappy x stack running inside wayland or making x better.

I'm only using KDE applications, Steam and Firefox. KDE should run perfectly fine without X in upcoming months. When comes to Firefox I can give up on it and switch to some Qt5 based browser. An only problem will be with steam, but rather than running entire X, using xwayland seems to be a way smarter idea.