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Fedora 25 To Run Wayland By Default Instead Of X.Org Server (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Fedora 25 will finally be the first release for this Linux distribution -- and the first tier-one desktop Linux OS at large -- that is going ahead and using Wayland by default. Wayland has been talked about for years as a replacement to the xorg-server and finally with the upcoming Fedora 25 release this is expected to become a reality. The X.Org Server will still be present on Fedora systems for those running into driver problems or other common issues.
Fedora's steering committee agreed to the change provided the release notes "are clear about how to switch back to X11 if needed." In addition, according to the Fedora Project's wiki, "The code will automatically fall back to Xorg in cases where Wayland is unavailable (like NVIDIA)."
Fedora's steering committee agreed to the change provided the release notes "are clear about how to switch back to X11 if needed." In addition, according to the Fedora Project's wiki, "The code will automatically fall back to Xorg in cases where Wayland is unavailable (like NVIDIA)."
Wayland is attractive to its developers because it explicitly implements a much reduced feature set compared to X11. Quite a few of the X11 features are historic and not of interest to very many modern users, but then again there are some features that are useful and Wayland doesn't offer a replacement for them.
X11 includes a rendering API for 2d graphics, and through extensions, for a variety of compositing and other more "modern" operations. Wayland provides no rendering API at all. Wayland is just a graphics compositing server with input support. It's a small fraction of what X is. It gives you a buffer to write your pixels into and you have to bring a rendering implementation to the party yourself.
This means that applications have even less coherency than they had with X11; X programs have a fundamental set of behaviors that are all the same due to using a single rendering framework. The degree to which this will matter in practice, given how poorly X programs adhere to any kind of common UI paradigm anyway, remains to be seen.
Apparently there's this thing called Mir that Ubuntu is developing that is a competitor to Wayland for the X replacement (where neither is actually a replacement, offering significantly less functionality in both cases). I guess that Ubuntu rejected Wayland and decided to roll their own. I would bet a fair sum that Fedora is pushing Wayland in this way to try to prevent Ubuntu from gathering its own momentum with Mir. I doubt they're pushing it for any reason that benefits end users. It's purely political as a means to prevent a competitor's favored X replacement from gaining support.
I have been an X user for about 26 years now and I have zero problems with it and would rather not see a replacement take over, especially one that is likely to be a step sideways/backwards from an end user perspective ala systemd. But given that Wayland by itself is not nearly as useful as X by itself, I expect that operating systems will use Wayland, at least for a while, as a layer underneath the X server. X will remain, it will just allow Wayland to own its frame buffer instead of owning it itself. And in the end, the functionality I require from X will remain because the X server will remain.