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Old 6th November 2010
backrow backrow is offline
Real Name: Anthony J. Bentley
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Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Albuquerque, NM
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Default Ubuntu moving away from X11, to Wayland

Ars Technica article
Mark Shuttleworth’s blog

Ubuntu has plans to adopt Wayland, an MIT‐licensed, non‐X windowing system. Wayland natively supports compositing and OpenGL, and pushes many things (such as hardware initialization and drm modesetting) out to the kernel.

This will not be right away, but in the (far) future.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Shuttleworth
Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that :-) but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem. Progress on Wayland itself is sufficient for me to be confident that no other initiative could outrun it, especially if we deliver things like Unity and uTouch with it. And also if we make an early public statement in support of the project. Which this is!
As far as I know, Wayland has not yet seen major deployment, but Intel is very interested in running it in MeeGo, and is sponsoring Qt development for it on MeeGo Touch in particular.

Of course, it has provisions for X backwards‐compatibility. The official website has some more information on Wayland’s architecture.


I’m happy to see this. Although I don’t know much about Wayland, it seems to have some nice features, and having some competition will no doubt spur some more improvements to X—as we saw with, say, LLVM and Google Chrome after their release. That said, I’m glad I’m not an Ubuntu user… they seem to have some trouble with keeping sweeping features stable (hello PulseAudio).
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