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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."
We don't currently have seamless integration of remote and local apps. For example, there is no audio or freedesktop.org notifications for remote applications. I personally use xpra to get this seamless integration. Even though the name has "x" in it is not fundamentally tied to X protocols and will probably be easy to port to wayland. The data transmitted over network is compressed bitmap.
X11 is more like a roof that was originally a 40-foot timber yacht. You've turned it upside down and fixed it to the tops of the walls. Gradually, over the years, you've patched in the holes until it only leaks when the wind is in the West. You've figured out how to get a flue up through the thing. You've nailed a TV antenna to it, and sealed around the cable with silicone. When you put it there you never bothered to take the decks out, so it's almost impossible to get into and work on and the structural elements, optimised rather for the sea than for housing, make it not very useful for storage. You still have to repaint it with pretty expensive paint every five years or so, else it starts to rot, and for some reason it attracts lots of confused-looking seagulls.
Anyway, look at all the features! It's got a winged keel, a 200hp diesel engine, and a gorgeous timber and brass wheel. All the fittings are marine-grade stainless, the rigging was all almost brand-new when you installed the thing and in her day she'd do 27kt reaching across a good wind. Don't actually use much of that any more, of course, but still...
Technically the keel still violates local planning ordinance, and technically it still smells quite a bit of fish. But it's been there for 15 years and it works. There's no need to replace it.
What's that love? You want to build an extension? Ah.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Welcome to *nix. You must be new here.
I rather like that the window manager, greeter, and locker are separate processes. I can replace them. I can mix and match according to my taste. I could even write my own if I wanted. This is the Unix way.
Example: you probably use some ubuntu-y, gnomey, kde kind of bullshit. That's fine for you but I have different tastes. So I use xdm to log in, wmaker to manage windows, and xscreensaver to lock my screen. Result: my X11 install is several hundred megabytes smaller than yours. But if I want your setup it's just a small apt-get away. This diversity, choice, and flexibility are why I like the *nix desktop in the first place.
But if I read you correctly, you want it to be all 1 big monolithic process? What is it, you're concerned about context switches between these processes on today's hardware? What the hell planet are you from? The X design has worked well for decades on much less powerful hardware than I have in my pocket today. X works fine on all of my devices, just like it did in the 90s, just like it does on my Nokia N900 running at 600mhz. I will be sticking with X for the time being.