Ubuntu System Compositor: Wayland Plug-In, Not Fork

One of the more interesting technical sessions last week at the UDS-Q summit was concerning the Ubuntu 12.10 plans for a system compositor, which would be based upon Wayland. While I still view it as unlikely to happen in any meaningful way for Ubuntu 12.10, other developers have since expressed their views as well.

Following the Wayland System Compositor talk at Ubuntu Developer Summit 12.10, some upstream developers have begun commenting.

In an email to ubuntu-x, views were shared by Kristian Høgsberg and "Darxus" to the Ubuntu developers:

- For the Ubuntu System compositor it should be possible to provide the needed functionality via a Wayland plug-in rather than forking Weston. (At the session last week, Ubuntu developers planned to fork the Weston reference compositor to turn it into the Ubuntu system compositor after removing features/functionality that they don't need.) Kristian suggests, "it should be possible to make a system compositor just another shell plugin." Although with the natural habit of Canonical to just fork projects, this may be hard to just create a plug-in.

- If "rotating cube transitions" and other effects are done as an extension of kernel modules, everyone (Wayland users) can benefit from the work.

- wlshm was mentioned.

Then in another ubuntu-x message were more independent thoughts about the Ubuntu System Compositor.

In other Wayland news, Pekka Paalanen wrote about Wayland anti-FUD. Pekka wrote a lengthy (and nice on a technical side) blog post to go against FUD suggesting that Wayland will lead to worse 3D performance and that network transparency will cause huge issues.

Wayland 1.0 is still planned for release this summer although I don't see an "Ubuntu System Compositor" for Ubuntu 12.10 happening in any real way, maybe just a technical/developer preview. See the earlier article for additional thoughts and all of the Phoronix UDS-Q coverage.