Re: Wayland & Unity -- any repercussions on Debian?
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:08:05 +0100, Klistvud wrote:
>>
>> As you probably know, Ubuntu is planning to replace X11 with the Wayland
>> Display Management System, and replace Gnome with Unity. X11 and Gnome
>> will still be in the Ubuntu repos, at least initially, but they won't be
>> the Ubuntu default anymore.
>>
>> What are your opinions on the matter, will this have repercussions for
>> Debian? *Should* it?
>
> I hope it's just an Ubuntu trend and not affecting/spreading to other
> distros >:-)
Re Unity:
Debian hasn't adopted upstart so why should it adopt unity? I'm sure
that it'll end up in the Debian repos for those of us who want to
try/use it. It would be fun (perverse, sadistic fun though!) to follow
any debian-devel thread started by someone proposing to make unity the
Debian default. :)
Re Wayland:
>From a Wayland FAQ:
<start>
Why fork the X server?
It's not an X server and not a fork. It's a minimal server that lets
clients communicate GEM buffers and information about updates to those
buffers to a compositor.
...
Is wayland replacing the X server?
It could replace X as the native Linux graphics server, but I'm sure X
will always be there on the side. I imagine that Wayland and X will
coexist in two ways on a Linux desktop:
1. Wayland is a graphics multiplexer for a number of X servers.
Linux today typically only uses one X server for GDM and the user
session, but we'll probably see that move to a dedicated GDM X server,
an X server for user sessions (spawning more on the fly as more users
log in) and maybe a dedicated screensaver/unlock X server. Right now
we rely on VT switching to move between X servers, and it's horrible.
We have no control over what the transitions look like and the VT
ioctls are pretty bad. Wayland provides a solution here, in that it
can host several X servers as they push their root window to Wayland
as surfaces. The compositor in this case will be a dedicated session
switcher that will cross-fade between X servers or spin them on a
cube.
2. Further down the road we run a user session natively under
Wayland with clients written for Wayland. There will still (always)
be X applications to run, but we now run these under a root-less X
server that is itself a client of the Wayland server. This will
inject the X windows into the Wayland session as native looking
clients. The session Wayland server can run as a nested Wayland
server under the system Wayland server described above, maybe even
side by side with X sessions.
There's a number of intermediate steps, such as running the GNOME
screen saver as a native wayland client, for example, or running a
composited X desktop, where the compositor is a Wayland client,
pushing the composited desktop to Wayland.
</end>
So the stories about X being ripped out and replaced in Ubuntu
11.10/12.04/... might not be entirely accurate.
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