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

Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand"

[DeathToBill]

Although the more detailed answer is that GTK/Qt apps will need recompiling with an updated library. If you use X11 directly, then you have more work - except that you can also run an X server within Wayland to support native X11 clients.

I've been impressed for some time with how well the Wayland developers have thought about backwards compatibility. X11 needs replacing; complaining that its different to X11 doesn't help solve the problems.

Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand"

[Hatta]

From the FAQ: "The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process."

The Wayland window manager will be built in. If you want to change your window manager, you have to change the display system itself.

Particularly egregious is the choice to have Wayland clients provide window decorations. That means that no matter what window manager you have compiled into Wayland, you can't centrally control the appearance of your desktop.

What happens if I want to use a Wayland distribution that provides a tiling window manager, but my apps are coded with window decorations? What happens if I want to use Fluxbox's built in window tabbing, but none of the clients support that?