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Ubuntu Is Switching to Wayland (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the little-surprise dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ubuntu is to ship Wayland in place of X.Org Server by default. Mir, Canonical's home-spun alternative to Wayland, had been billed as the future of Ubuntu's convergence play. But both Unity 8 the convergence dream was recently put out to pasture, meaning this decision was widely expected. It's highly likely that the traditional X.Org Server will, as on Fedora, be included on the disc and accessible from whichever login screen Ubuntu devs opt to use in ubuntu 17.10 onwards. This session will be useful for users whose system experience issues running on Wayland, or who need features and driver support that is only present in the legacy X.Org server session.

3 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. But is Wayland better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As long as Linux can remember where I positioned my monitors after I put the laptop back into the docking station, and as long as I can wayland-over-ssh, and as long as there are performance gains, then I don't care.

    I'm sure this post will be littered with "I hate change" type posts where people lament the loss of X for no other reason than passion and nostalgia, and I'll have to dredge through loads of nonsense before someone actually puts together a point-form list of pros and cons comparing Wayland to X

    1. Re:But is Wayland better? by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Network transparency. X11 has it. Wayland doesn't. Wayland's devs tend to handwave the problem, either claiming it will somehow be implemented once they work on the other laundry list of things they want first, or claiming it's a niche requirement nobody wants or uses.

      On top of that they're doing the #1 thing you're not supposed to do in development: completely rewriting a working system.

      X11's main flaw is that it's supposed to be inefficient. It might be, but I've never noticed any significant difference between user interface performance on Ubuntu vs Windows or Mac. I think much of it is "This sub-nanosecond operation that is only called once or twice every frame takes THREE TIMES AS LONG under X11 as it should!" type purism.

      I'm not happy about this.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re:But is Wayland better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I am not managing a computer remotely, I am using a computer remotely. Yeah, I ssh in. Always start with command line work - just like I do with a local login.

      But then I need some word processing. So I start the word processor on the remote machine, and view the window locally. Common case, do it several times per week. No, I don't want to transfer the file here, run a word processor locally, and then transfer it back. That is hell, especially when there is a large set of dependant files. Figures and whatnot.

      Surely this sort of thing can be done with wayland too. Wayland renders to memory and then blits to some display. All we need is to transfer that memory - or at least the changed altered - over the network. Then render on the display at hand.

      It is a necessary function, but something that shouldn't be all that hard. I don't expect to run 3D games this way - but word processing used to be fine over an ADSL line to the office 6km away - surely wayland can be made to run over the fiber I have today.