Is Wayland the new X?

[Gnubee-Vern]

There have been articles, (April's edition of Linux Format magazine for example), saying that Ubuntu and Fedora could be switching to a new display server called Wayland soon. I don't know too much about it yet, but it doesn't work with proprietary drivers and Nvidia does not plan to support it the last I heard. Canonical is trying to figure out how to put Compiz into Wayland as a plug-in using only open source software.

Are there plans to switch Sabayon from X.org to Wayland?

Does anyone know more about this project?

I would be interested in your opinions as well; is this a good thing?

Thanks,
Gnubee-Vern

[joost]

Not in the next 2 years no.

[micia]

The "innovations" brought by Fedora and Ubuntu, in my humble opinion, never worked and never have been a good thing, just look at pulseaudio

I can't see a valid reason to replace X Server, a software that works, is scalable, is well mantained and is the foundation of any FreeBSD, Linux, and Unix GUI system.
This is a typical example of breaking standards that work, this is something that Microsoft does (and can do because it is the de-facto standard), but a system that relies only on standards to work fine should not do.

Wayland has backward compatibility with X, but it involves an additional emulation step, meaning that anyone that wants to support multiple platforms, will write just the X code, because it would be too much work to support just one platform to write many versions of the same code, this will cause, in my opinion, Wayland applications to go slower than conventional X applications.
In its current state, in order to write good and portable Unix software, one should support:

- Wayland
- X using Xlib
- (possibly) X using XCB
- PulseAudio
- OSS
- ALSA

Or rely in one of the billion libraries that do the same thing, involving external dependencies (and you are not guaranteed that the library does support all of this).
I don't think this is a good situation, and if it keeps going like this, I don't think it will get better.
But this is only my opinion.

[BlueJayofEvil]

Phoronix has a collection of their Wayland-related articles in their forums (here).

[Gnubee-Vern]

Thank all of you for your posts. It's good to know that Sabayon will continue using the X server, and it's always good to learn more about Linux as well. A great community is another reason that Sabayon is an outstanding distro.

Gnubee-Vern

[dudumomo]

Wayland is now in version 1.0.

Is the project more mature enough to give it a try on Sabayon?
Will devs consider it will bring added value to the Sabayon distribution?

I'm interested to know more.

[micia]

Based on this:
http://www.chaosreigns.com/wayland/state/
I don't think it is a good idea yet.

As any other technology and choice, it can be discussed via Sabayon development mailing list (as well as on the forums), I think.

[Stupot]

Wayland at 1.0 just means that the API is stable, so now developers can start developing on it. It is not ready to be used for anything other than development yet.

Trying to actually use it would be worse than using KDE 4.0 (which was supposed to be the same thing, released for developers, not full time use). Although, it would be even more futile, as you simply can't really use Wayland yet. Wayland won't really be used for another year or so.