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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.'"
...but I still know a LOT of people who forward X over SSH, and there are still a lot of professors who are advising their students (at least in the engineering schools I have seen) to do the same. I guess this is one of those times that just saying, "I use Linux!" will not convey what people think.
Palm trees and 8
This article reads less like a news story than an emotional, personal rant by someone who's puckering with contempt because he got his feelings hurt.
Tech companies make crappy decisions all the time. Ubuntu probably thought it would have more time to become the king of the desktop before realizing that soon the desktop would be irrelevant and that *nix alternatives had already beaten it to the punch for being the kings of mobile.
At this point, he should probably start thinking further down the road to gesture and voice computing. My kinect tells me that it's almost time to stop touching devices at all, and I believe it.
I remember a discussion a year or two ago here on Slashdot how X was badly in need of replacing. Sounds to me like Canonical have the right idea, and the impetus to make it happen.
which is totally what she said
I'd suggest it's mostly to do with the move to compositing window managers, which X was not designed for.
The most specifically obvious example - video.
Video is these days presented by slapping a video texture on a window. If the render of the video frames to the texture isn't done simultaneously with the render of the video frames to the screen, you see "tearing", or a line where one frame ends and another frame begins, something you shouldn't see at all.
The same phenomena happens with composited windows, which are also rendered textures ; drag a window around at speed on a poorly configured X / Compiz desktop and you will see the tearing where two frames of the desktop texture are being rendered out of sync with the screen.
Many users now have more than one screen. X cannot render a single desktop to two screens and keep both synced. While it's possible to get one screen synced, it's not always easy, and getting both screens synced seems to be impossible.
Now, this clearly isn't a hardware limitation, because Windows can and does do this right - I have never seen application windows or video tear on the Aero desktop. This is on the same nVidia card, both operating systems running the official nVidia drivers.
This is one of the few things about Linux that annoys me when I compare it to Windows. The other is PulseAudio - but I have workarounds for my PulseAudio problems. It just looks sloppy to have great big tears in your otherwise very pretty composite display, and if you want to enjoy a movie, you are either stuck with using only one of your screens.