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Ubuntu Delays Wayland Plans, System Compositor
An anonymous reader writes "The Wayland-usage in Ubuntu 12.10 via setting it up as a system video compositor has been delayed to at least Ubuntu 13.04. Developers made progress on running Ubuntu on Wayland (there are experimental packages available), but they need more time to complete their work and ready Wayland. For those wanting to try out Wayland on Linux, there is a specialty Wayland LiveCD."
Wayland is designed to fix a lot of the problems that X has. X, for historical reasons, does a TON of things. It has network transparency, it's responsible for input, for setting up the graphics card's memory and registers, drawing various primitive shapes, font rendering, etc.
But today 99% of the time people don't use the network transparency stuff in X, they run locally. But all sorts of memory has to be shuffled around. X mandates all sorts of bitmap formats that must be supported. Today the kernel, through KMS, can setup the graphics card. We have libraries like Cairo to draw basic shapes. Then there are all sorts of weird things that have been hacked into/onto X to support common features like resizing and rotating your desktop.
Wayland basically started with a blank slate. The kernel can setup the video card, so it won't do that. Most people don't use network transparency, so it doesn't do that (you can run an X client on Wayland, for when you still need the feature). The GUI toolkits and OpenGL libraries already draw everything, so it doesn't do that stuff.
LWN had an article from two years ago about what Wayland set out to accomplish. Things may have changed since there, here are two updates from LWN describing Wayland earlier this year.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
can Awesome be ported to Wayland itself, so that it manages X clients and native Wayland clients?
Yes, but with a twist. Wayland doesn't have window managers as a separate process. Instead of porting your preferred window manager to work with Wayland, one would implement the Wayland protocol support in the window manager, with help from libwayland for the common parts. Supposedly the Wayland support only requires about as much code as the boilerplate for an X window manager. Of course, X core rendering and XRender will be unavailable. If the WM already uses a portable library like Cairo, GTK+ or Qt for rendering that shouldn't be a problem; otherwise all the drawing code would need to be ported as well.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
My understanding of Wayland says that it wouldn't bother Valve at all.
If you use a toolkit that has been ported to Wayland, you use the toolkit and nothing changes.
If you use a toolkit that hasn't been ported, you'd just run the X server that runs as a Wayland client, so things keep working.
But the important thing is running OpenGL, which works just fine in Wayland (which is built on OpenGL).
Unless Valve is writing their own rendering directly against X (which seems like it would be an idiotic thing to do in general, especially considering Wayland has been coming for over 2 years), I wouldn't think this would really effect them. In fact, they could decide to go Wayland only (assuming it's done enough at that point) and avoid whatever hassle X might have given them.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Wayland is an attempt to remove the network transparency of X... in a world where everything is networked.
I just don't get why they are so keen to get rid off that faeture... When I was in uni (just four years ago) our department had a powerful Sun server that mostly powered the computer lab's thin clients but also allowed ssh access from the outside. Being able to log into that server via ssh with X forwarding and run Maple, Mathematica, ... was awesome and saved me the expense of getting any of that software myself.