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.