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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."
>> Will applications need to be rewritten or modified to work on Wayland? Yes. (From TFA.)
As a developer, I'm about to get off the Ubuntu train. Every major release recently has required tweaking the UI (e.g., tray icon behavior changes). I'm not really looking forward to another migration, especially when there are Red Hat and SUSE users (who tend to buy more) who are looking for things too.
Is there anyone who still thinks the Ubuntu release team prioritizes either usability or low number of bugs now? That's a serious question; I have no idea why this is considered a novel or even notable thing at this point. New Ubuntu release, leading edge software that's not ready for prime time is included, the release is at best beta quality software by any reasonable standard. Same story in every release going back to at least the 8.04 PulseAudio debacle.
That would be sad.
But beyond that: there's one big deficiency of current X applications--if the X server dies, so do all graphical programs.
That's quite surprising when you think about it.
After all the graphical programs are X clients. Why would a client up and die just because some server died?
Does your browser die when a webserver dies?
And please, no pretending that X on Linux doesn't crash. It does, and this is the 4th time I've restarted this laptop today. Hanging hard with VirtualBox.
To sum: If the graphics server crashes, I'd like to see it automatically restart with Upstart, and then the clients automatically reconnect.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I have no comment on 'wayland good' versus 'wayland bad', but it is certainly a known quantity and it has been waiting in the wings to replace X for a while.
As you said, the dream of replacing X has been around for a very long time. No one has done it because it is a ton of work and because the changes are bound to piss off some developers and users (see "pound sand" post above).
I'm impressed that the Ubuntu folks are going to take this on and I wish them well. If they succeed then the rest of the distro's will probably follow suite.
Without X we will lose network transparency among many other great features. Let's not even mention the lack of gpu support to say the least.
VDPAU? They don't mention it, so I assume its going bye bye. Its kind of funny in that everything I use X for is everything Wayland opposes.
Just this weekend I was ssh -X into my mythtv backend to run the config program to add another capture card running X over the network, so my binary only nvidia cards using VDPAU have more to look at. I never use stupid animations and other 3-d foolishness on my desktop because I'm unimpressed; its the 2010's version of the 1980's demand that all desktop publishing projects must use a minimum of 50 different ugly fonts to show off that you can do it. I prefer my content to be my primary interest, not my window animations. Of course all of that is impossible over wayland. Thanks guys for exactly what I don't need! Maybe you could make it eink and touch screen only, just to annoy me further?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I think GP's point is that RDP remoting architecture (which is perfectly doable on Weyland) is better than X11 model.