Intel, Red Hat Working On Enabling Wayland Support In GNOME

sfcrazy writes "After shooting down Canonical's Mir, Intel and Red Hat teams have increased collaboration on the development of Wayland. Developers at Intel and Red Hat are working together to 'merge and stabilize the patches to enable Wayland support in GNOME,' as Christian Schaller writes on his blog. The teams are also looking into improving the stack further. Weston won't be used anymore, so GNOME Shell will become the Wayland compositor. It must be noted that Canonical earlier committed to supporting and embracing Wayland. Despite that promise, the company silently stopped contribution, and it was later learned that they were secretly working on their own display server, Mir. Intel's management recently rejected patches for Mir, leaving its maintainance to Canonical. Before Intel's rejection, GNOME and KDE also refused to adopt Mir. Intel's message is clear to Canonical: if you promise to contribute, then do so."

Comments

Re:Why?

[JesseMcDonald]

My remote X11 clients run on these machines and present their UIs on my local X11 display server running on my laptop. While it is probably true that these clients are not transmitting XDrawLine and XFillArc protocol elements to render their UIs, they are still mostly assembling pre-rendered bitmaps, widgets, and font glyph assets to send down the wire for rendering on the local server. How is this going to work on Wayland?

Actually, what the clients are doing right now is assembling bitmaps, widgets, and font glyph assets into a pixmap on the client side, most likely without the benefits of GPU acceleration, and sending the result as an uncompressed pixmap over the wire to the X server, which hands it off to a compositor, which combines the pixmap with images from other applications and hands the result back to the X server. If they're luck enough not to need any special transformations or compositing effects, the clients may be able to leave the rendering of the individual font glyphs to the server, but that's about it.

With Wayland the clients are doing the same work to assemble the surfaces for their windows, but they get to use the local GPU to do it, and the result is compressed by a local off-screen Wayland proxy server using modern video codecs before being transmitted over the network for compositing.

On a desktop, the only advantage to Wayland is that it facilitates implementing a pretty compositing desktop. This is a fad that is already starting to fade from fashion.

Distracting toys like "wobbly windows" may be fading from fashion, but composited desktops are here to stay.