Ubuntu moving towards Wayland

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 04:05 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:

> > And what happens when all the apps are native Wayland apps and
> > none of those can be run remotely?
> > 
> > If I wanted to step back to the pre-net era, I'd run Windows.
> 
> +1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
> technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
> cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
> things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.

AIUI the Grand Plan is for everyone to write apps in GTK+ and Qt (which
is more or less the case already), and for GTK+ and Qt to be compatible
with *both* Wayland and X. Again AIUI, there's no impediment to this in
the design of Wayland and it's actually what Wayland's designers expect
to happen, in order to make sure things still work on platforms where
Wayland isn't available, and to deal with exactly this kind of case.

So I think the future vision is that if you're running on your system
you get a shiny Wayland-y version, and if you run something via ssh -x
you get a slightly less pretty X version. And all the Hard Stuff happens
in the background and you don't really have to care about it. If I'm
wrong, someone correct me, but I think I'm right and people are getting
a rather misleading vision of a glorious future where everything only
runs on Wayland, which I don't think is the idea at all.

(presumably if you're one of the few apps which don't use a toolkit, you
should yourself make sure you support both Wayland and X. Or make sure
no-one wants to run your apps over a network, or there's another way to
do it.)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net