Wayland's Current Release Manager Is Stepping Down, Following Samsung's Open-Source Drama

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland's Current Release Manager Is Stepping Down, Following Samsung's Open-Source Drama

Derek Foreman, formerly of Samsung Research (Open-Source Group), who had been serving as the release manager of Wayland and the Weston compositor for the past number of release cycles is stepping down from his role...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-DF-Stepping-Down

[wswartzendruber]

Interesting, in light of Samsung joining the Alliance for Open Media.

[Anvil]

the future of Wayland/Weston looks rather slim. this is where Redhat/IBM need to Help out an drop a project an work on this instead. or Wayland an Weston will Die

[MrEcho]

IMO I think the project tried to make everyone happy, and play nice with existing systems, Gnome / KDE. In doing so they pretty much tried to make the impossible.

The only way I see a new GFX / Desktop GUI for Linux is to do it all in one. Server + Client + WM / Interface
Really rethink the whole thing. With a lot of the GFX Cards now supported in the Kernel and or Mesa, it should make it easier. Also there is no need to do networking with a desktop, its pointless now days, the GUI is going to be on the same box as the GFX hardware, and if you need remote theres things for that. So that will solve a lot of the protocol issues.

I think doing your own WM / Interface that no one would support out the gate would be an issue, and you would have to make some api wrappers to kind of get things kick started. But at the end I think a lot of apps would switch from Gnome and KDE to the new system. If you look at the eco system right now, some Gnome and KDE apps require you do load a whole crap load of other sub systems for them to work, so even right now its a mess.

It would be even more work then what Wayland/Weston has done so far, but going into it as a full solution would make things easier. You could build a Desktop system that is still super flexible, but there would be core systems that you could not load a replacement. I look at OSX and Windows and what they provide for a desktop experience, yes both have general issues, but theres one way to do an desktop application, or theres one way to do a systray, or one way to show active applications. (yes I know windows is in a transition phase). I know the general Linux community hates 'one way' things, ex systemD. But I think its time to start thinking of doing the same thing for the Linux Desktop

[Awesomeness]

Sad news but Weston is useless anyway since it stopped being the test ground for Wayland.

Wayland itself will be fine.

[Ironmask]

I'm really not worried, considering the unmaintainability of Xorg, it's virtually inevitable something else will replace it. Wayland's still got the support of the entire Xorg team and every graphics hardware/driver manufacturer out there.

[ms178]

Maybe Intel will push Wayland/Weston more. Their open source record is solid and they might have an incentive with their new Xe GPUs coming soon to invest more into the Linux desktop ecosystem.

[Terrablit]

ITT: Lots of people who forget that Wayland is a protocol and Weston is just the reference implementation of that protocol. Meaning it's intended to be an example implementation for new implementers. The whole protocol thing means it's more annoying to implement from scratch, but also means it's less demanding about how you implement it. It's intended to provide the core mechanisms for a desktop GUI like X does without mandating extra cruft or specific implementations. Like stippling.

the future of Wayland/Weston looks rather slim. this is where Redhat/IBM need to Help out an drop a project an work on this instead. or Wayland an Weston will Die

Most people won't run vanilla Weston. They could run Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, or Sway, which all support Wayland. I think there's even more WMs/DEs that support Wayland. So there's still lots of people working on and with Wayland the protocol. It's nowhere close to dying. It just lost a corporate sponsor that's never really been a great FOSS member in the first place.

Great news, die bloatware, die.

Yes, Wayland solutions will probably use more resources than X. But the level of increased functionality requires those new resources. If you're that concerned with saving every spare KB of memory that you can by Marie Kondo-ing every possible convenience feature, I'm sure 2003 and Linux 2.6 would welcome you with open arms. Go spark some joy.

Besides, the way I see it, a lot of the bloat will go away when we can finally laser off the X barnacles that have latched on to the ass of Linux GUIs for the past 30 years. Nothing says bloat like a feature that's been unused in the entire lifetime of people graduating from college.

The X windowing system is well maintained.

Hardly. It's been stabilized on life support. People only touch it when they absolutely have to, which is the complete opposite of well-maintained. Few people understand the entire thing, and no one goes into it unless it's to fix a specific issue. It's effectively bit-rotting. All the major X developers are Wayland developers, and they'll be quite glad when it finally gets EOLed.

There are very few native wayland applications so X will live forever and wayland will die.

And there are also relatively few native X applications. Most are built on toolkits that give them a fair chance of being ported to Wayland. Considering 80% of Linux desktop users run Gnome or KDE, the impact of switching will be minimal after the existing implementation issues are ironed out. Statistical anomolies can switch directly to X themselves or use X from inside Wayland.

</popcorn>

[Azrael5]

I appreciate that intel developers are involving in wayland development, because I consider Intel the best contributor in Linux although their bugged CPus. Wayland is improving in GNome, KDe and I think in Qxt too. I hope Nvidia will provide very soon a driver able to support it.

[Ironmask]

The X windowing system is well maintained. There are very few native wayland applications so X will live forever and wayland will die.

Honestly a bit shocked by the venom of this post.

Firstly, pretty sure the Wayland project sparked from disgruntled Xorg devs, and I recall hearing the entire Xorg team is on the Wayland project. Isn't Xorg infamous for having a "abandon all hope ye who enter here" comment in it's source?

I'm also a bit shocked at how anti-choice you sound. Don't you usually post around here saying how much you dislike Systemd? Well I don't like Xorg. Why don't you use another init system and I'll use another display protocol and we can both wish each other the best instead of insisting our respective choice of software perish? Or, if you believe in not having alternatives that strongly, you can just use Windows or macOS where everything is hard-preinstalled for you with little in the way of alternatives. Not saying it's a bad thing, just that you seem to prefer nobody change their installation from what yours is, and the previously mentioned operating systems are the best way to achieve that.