Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland in Quantal Quetzal

jones_supa writes "While there's still more than one month until the Ubuntu 12.10 feature freeze, Ubuntu developers continue to work towards their tight schedule of having Wayland serve as the compositor for the Quantal Quetzal release due out in October. Canonical's intends to provide smooth transitions from boot to shutdown. Wayland is also used for session switching and other operations, avoiding traditional VT switching, providing a consistent monitor layout, using the greeter as the lock screen, ensuring that locked sessions are actually secure from displaying, and showing the greeter while the session loads. Phoronix remains skeptical about Ubuntu making the deadline."

Comments

Developers won't meet fictional deadline?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article and the Ubuntu Wayland wiki. The Ubuntu developers have not set any deadline, they don't appear to have set a specific goal, they're just continuing their work on Wayland as usual. The article appears to have just pulled the release target out of the author's arse and then claimed the developers won't make it in time. From the linked page:

"When will Wayland become the default on Ubuntu?
This has not been decided. This decision will be made at a future Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS)."

So apparently the developers won't reach their goal that they haven't set. How is this a story?

Re:I have long dreamt of the day

[kriston]

I agree. Wayland needs to happen. We've wasted so much time, effort, and knowledge keeping X Windows up and running. I sometimes think about how much further along desktop Linux might be if we threw off the shackles of X Windows years ago. There's a reason Android and MacOS do not use X Windows.

Wayland will NOT be replacing X11 in 12.10

[Anonymous Coward]

Canonical has plans to include Wayland as a technical preview in 12.10, not as a replacement for X11. This means that they have to actually get it working at a basic level before putting it in the repositories. While Canonical is pushing Wayland, they've already said that it's still several years away from becoming a viable replacement for X11. This is just Canonical trying to push forward the development of a peice of software they believe in.

Re:I have long dreamt of the day

[Anonymous Coward]

The Ubuntu folks aren't developing Wayland. Wayland is being developed pretty much entirely by Intel employees. Ubuntu is just planning to integrate it.

Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand"

[snadrus]

Sure. X11 needs replacing because its hardware acceleration is worse than Wayland. X11 is actually many programs acting like layers: window mgr, compositor, greeter, locker, etc will be only 1 under Wayland. And still the design is simpler than any one. It's not that the code is being added, but that a no-longer-useful X11-style abstraction is being let-go.

Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand"

[DeathToBill]

And, in case you missed some of the metaphor there, the basic problem with X11 as a display system for desktop systems today is that none of the apps written for it actually use X11. Your multiple monitors work because of Xrandr - which isn't part of X11. Your 3D effects work by bypassing the X server and making OpenGL calls - not part of X11. It's supported by all the hardware vendors - and most of that support is in kernel drivers, not in the X server itself. VT switching works... more... or... less... until you'd actually like to switch VT before you get back from your coffee break, or your X server doesn't recover correctly. And, in case you missed it, they're not provided by X11. And I'm not sure what boot times have to do with it?

Your apps draw using Cairo or similar, not X11. They draw onto a buffer provided by the compositing extension, not X11. The buffer gets put into video memory by the compositor, not X11.

So why exactly are we keeping X11 hanging around? Why not get rid of it and halve the size of the display server code base, making it much easier to program against in the process? Why are we carting around a heuge amount of code that is of no modern relevance except to be able to claim that it is an X server? The maintenance burden of the current X server is too much and any thought of adding new capabilities horrific.

Otherwise, your arguments amount to, "No-one supports it yet so it's a waste of time." Good on Canonical for pushing it - if anyone has a vague chance of getting vendors to support it, it seems they might.