Fedora moving to wayland

[Richard Pieri]

On Nov 15, 2010, at 11:06 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> I've just seen the open source community move from a working system to a
> "new and improved" system that is not as featureful, but then they drop
> the working system completely without making the new version
> feature-compatible.  Then those of us using those no-longer-available
> features of the old working system get left in the lurch.

As a data point, some 90% of X11's capabilities are never used.  I pointed this out before but it bears repeating: the X server is a heavy-weight communications server that includes a display system.  It would be more accurate to describe a group of X11 workstations as a distributed computing cluster because that's what X11 really is: a networked, distributed computing platform.

What Wayland offers is a separation of display from the communications stack.  Mapping X11 display primitives to OpenGL/DRI equivalents is not hard.  The result will be everything you currently use with the X11 display running faster and with a smaller footprint.  The few who need the full communications stack will still have it available via X.Org.  Everybody wins.

--Rich P.