Fedora moving to wayland

[Jon Masters]

On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 11:37 -0500, Richard Pieri wrote:
> 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.

Yes, but it's also a standard provided by many other UNIX and Linux
platforms. If we in the Linux space continue down the path of
re-inventing technologies in non-industry standardized ways because we
know better, then we will lose in the longer term. We'll have very fast,
lightweight, wonderful protocols that non-Linux can't talk to easily.

> 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.

That's not entirely true either. While I don't think it's all doom and
gloom, or that Wayland will suddenly take over, I am concerned that
there will be a push to use it on desktops that will gain enough
momentum before we've made sure that other bases are handled. And the
idea that the app. frameworks will forever support both X and something
else is nuts - they won't. We'll see a slow erosion of support for X if
we're not very careful to consider other non-desktop folks.

Jon.