Update On Wayland and X11 Support

Phoronix was at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and has two articles on the status of Wayland and X11 integration. The second talk was about the current status of Wayland, and its impending release (version 1.0 is due this summer). The developers also have an experimental GNOME-Shell working on Wayland. There's a (kind of shaky) video of this talk (attached, and at youtube for those wanting the html5 version). The first talk (by Keith Packard) covered X11 support on Wayland. It's basically ready to go, but window management is implemented only as a hack right now. The next year could be quite exciting for GNU/Linux and BSD users as distributions begin including Wayland as an alternative to X.org.

Comments

Re:Wayland vs X

[Urban Garlic]

This.

Network transparency is huge -- I often need to run graphical installers for commercial software, or run graphical diagnostic software, on systems that live in my machine room, and have fairly basic video cards, and in any case don't routinely have graphical displays attached.

The really-right answer to this, of course, is to separate the display from the the installer and/or diagnostic executable, and connect over a network socket or something, but in practice this doesn't happen. In practice, I connect via SSH with the X session forwarded, and run the graphical app that way.

The loss of network transparency makes remote access much more complicated. It's not lethal, there are things you can do with remote desktop viewers that work, but you end up hacking together a rickety, insecure new solution to what used to be a solved problem -- it really doesn't feel like progress.