

XWayland in XOrg - tbrock
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=6e539d8817f738289dc2dea13d0720116287ab9d

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Spittie
A very interesting blog post about this:
[http://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/](http://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/)

It seems to explain many questions that where posted here the last time this
was submitted.

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heyitsme
Could someone in the know-how explain if this will help those who use
X-dependent window managers. Will one be able to run wayland in the future,
but yet use (say) fvwm? I've used fvwm for over 10 years and there is really
nothing out there that gives its flexibility, so i'm wondering if once wayland
is mainstream, the old window managers will become useless.

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null_ptr
So as a _user_ of modern Linux distributions, what can I expect in the near
future from display server changes? Will my everyday experience be affected in
any way, or do X/Wayland/Mir work so deep under the hood that applications
talk to abstraction layers that can be ported between the 3?

~~~
Spittie
In the near future, probably nothing. Wayland is (probably) still years from
getting adopted even by "bleeding-edge" distributions like Arch.

Your everyday experience shouldn't get affected, hopefully. Wayland removes a
lot of legacy from X, but their end result is pretty much the same, "display
some stuff on my screen". And XWayland should assure this, since you'll be
able to run applications that don't support X on Wayland in a seamless way.
Most applications use some toolkit anyway (gtk, qt) that are getting ported to
Wayland, so the author of that applications shouldn't do any changes to make
it work on Wayland (beside recompiling it).

At best, Wayland should be lighter than X, and it should fix tearing if you
have some now (but this is already fixed by modern wm, at least on my
computer).

One of the biggest change that you shouldn't notice is security, X has tons of
holes (every application can read/write into another application), which
wayland fix (see here for more: [http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/02/19/wayland-
compositors-why-and...](http://mupuf.org/blog/2014/02/19/wayland-compositors-
why-and-how-to-handle/)).

Same for Mir (but I dunno about the security issues that Wayland fixes), but
upstream doesn't seems willing to accept Mir-specific patches, so Canonical
might end with having to patch applications/toolkit/drivers downstream (but
the user shouldn't notice any difference anyway).

~~~
shmerl
Why "years"? KDE and Gnome are close to enabling Wayland support during this
year. The only unknown is when proprietary drivers will do it. Apparently
Nvidia is working on it. So they might finish this year as well. Things look
good so far.

~~~
Spittie
I want Wayland to ship as soon as possible, I'm looking at the situation in
the most "negative" way so that if it ship sooner than I believe, I'll be
happy, and if it doesn't, I'll not be sad. (Wayland has been close to shipping
for a lot of time now, remember when Shuttleworth wanted to ship it in 12.04
as a developer preview? The good old times when Canonical didn't suffer from
NIH).

Gnome should ship with Wayland considered as stable with 3.14, and (as far as
I know), there's no plain to ship KDE on Wayland before KDE5. XWayland still
need works, and without it no distro will ship Wayland. The proprietary
drivers still need to come out (Nvidia might be at work on them already, but
for all we know it might still be just some drawing on a blackboard - and
let's not forget about AMD, that will probably take quite a bit of time).

Also "normal" distro (Mint, openSUSE, Fedora...) will probably take their time
as well to ensure that everything is working. I'd expect to see some kind of
experimental preview, then a version with support to both (but with the
default still being X) and then a version with Wayland (and an X failback).

Probably I'm just being negative here, and if everything happens faster than
how I think it will, then great! Also, probably just a generic "years" feels
too much, my expected timeframe is/was 2-3 years.

~~~
shmerl
KDE5 is coming out in June, but initial release will not support Wayland in
KWin. But it should come after as an update. I'm not sure about exact
schedules though.

See:

* [http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma/2014.6_Release_Sche...](http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma/2014.6_Release_Schedule)

* [http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/kde5-and-wayla...](http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/kde5-and-wayland/)

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shmerl
I hope drivers will catch up on EGL/Wayland support. Especially Nvidia one.
Can't wait to start using Wayland based desktop (KDE should get in shape
during this year).

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Already__Taken
Isn't this the exact text that's quoted in the nVidia reply from the other
day?

What's the news (without sounding snarky), Confirming that nVidia's is being
ignored in this decision?

~~~
mjg59
It's committed rather than having merely been posted for review.

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notastartup
what kind of applications can we see with XWayland replacing X? Will headless
applications be more common? What sort of things will be created with it?

