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Ubuntu Dumps X For Unity On Wayland

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will move away from the traditional X.org display environment to Wayland — a more modern alternative. The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system. Shuttleworth said, 'We're confident we’ll be able to retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition that needs to reset the world of desktop free software. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we'll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all its GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop. We'll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there's no reason for them not to be there on day one either.'"

10 of 640 comments (clear)

  1. Wayland... by DaPhil · · Score: 5, Informative
    For anyone else wondering what Wayland is: "Wayland is a lightweight display server for the GNU/Linux desktop. Started by Kristian Høgsberg [...] the software's stated goal is "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker"" (Wikipedia)

    Here is the website and the wikipedia entry.

  2. Summary's BOGUS... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Uh... Guys... Wayland doesn't preclude X11. Think of X11 as a two part system. One's the rendering and compositing layer and the other is the network transport layer that makes it network transparent. Wayland's the driver backend guts. They've shown MULTIPLE X11 desktops being ran on top of Wayland.

    This isn't the thing that many make it out to be. SERIOUSLY.

  3. A bit sensationalist... by Scyth3 · · Score: 5, Informative

    They're slowing transitioning away from X to Wayland. They're not straight up "dumping" X. It'll be there for quite a few releases. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/linux-beyond-x-shuttleworth-contemplates-wayland.ars

  4. Breathe Deep... by gti_guy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Calm down people. This isn't any different than Mac OS X using Cocoa for the desktop display and still having X11 available to run as another app. And yes (if you've never tried it), X tunneled through ssh works just fine on Mac OS X. It will be the same thing with the next release of Ubuntu. The sky is NOT falling.

  5. Re:No standards at all by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm getting sick of this crap "journalism". if you want to make a comment, add a comment. Don't add your opinion to the summary. Just report the facts. If you really have to, blog about your opinion and add a link to that blog, stating that it's your opinion.

    You must be new here. The summary of an article is nearly always the *opinion* of whoever submitted it. The "news" part is in the original source to which the link(s) in the summary point (assuming the original source isn't itself just an opinion or troll). The summary IS the "blog" part, and it acts as the root of the entire discussion thread. That's the way it has always worked on this site, and it's not very hard to figure out.

  6. Wayland can host X by sd.fhasldff · · Score: 5, Informative

    Then it's a good thing Wayland can host X. It would require some (reportedly) minor adjustments to X, but it would be transparent to individual applications.

  7. Re:No standards at all by Tharsman · · Score: 5, Informative

    Although I generally agree with this feeling, if you read TFA, you would find this quote:

    There’s now little reason for these GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.

    So as you can see, it's not something the summary writter made up, he just pasted something that was already in TFA, with just one word changed by a short phrace to better fit the short summary context: "There's" with "The move means there is"

    If you want to insult the article itself, go for it, but at least in this one case, your insult of the summary is horrendously out of place.

  8. Re:Ok great for beginners by dpilot · · Score: 5, Informative

    You mean like the fact that I need to use the same Cadence you're talking about as part of my day job, as well as a whole host of other X-based VLSI CAD applications. Every now and then I need to work from home, and X lets me do that. To be sure, sometimes I use VNC, but sometimes I run the X tools native on my home system, too. Different tasks call for different approaches.

    Leaving work out of it, sometimes I just like to run some GUI tools on my server, with the display exported back to my desktop. My server doesn't even have an X server installed.

    I strongly suspect that the people who pooh-pooh the networking capabilities of X never got used to using them.

    --
    The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  9. Re:No standards at all by jemtallon · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the article: "There’s now little reason for these GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system."

    So... slashdot did a good job?

  10. Re:Ok great for beginners by AaxelB · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. Linux is not Unix
    2. X is neither part of Unix nor required for it.

    Anything else you'd like to add to this discussion?

    Nice troll! You managed to choose a topic that is probably as complex and volatile as Kirk vs. Picard, but yet is not as familiar.

    Nah, it's pretty well known and accepted that Linux is not Unix. Linux is certainly and undeniably Unix-like, but it's not Unix.

    Not really complex. Not really volatile. Not a troll.