Ubuntu ditching X for Wayland

[VonPickle]

Mark Shuttleworth announced on his blog today that Unity will be embracing the X Window System replacement Wayland, the OpenGL based display management system. In his own Words

The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system. We’d like to embrace Wayland early, as much of the work we’re doing on uTouch and other input systems will be relevant for Wayland and it’s an area we can make a useful contribution to the project.

Linky

Great news, I love the direction Mark is taking Ubuntu, this has my full support.

 

[MyWorld]

Well, there will be a lot of growing pains and tears spilled, like everything new and cutting edge, like this statement:

In general, this will all be fine – actually *great* – for folks who have good open source drivers for their graphics hardware.

So we who use Nvidia and Radeon drivers to get out games going are going to have to bear a bit of discomfort till they get 3D rendering up to par, basically by forcing these companies to release either their source, which will never happen, or by asking them to fork their current drivers and support BOTH X and Wayland.
It seems like Wayland is the logical step forward, although I'm not up to speed with all the alternatives, so here is holding thumbs that we game junkies get decent drivers early on.

When we moved from XFree86 to X it was a worldwide jump caused by XFree86 changing their license, so overnight every single sane distro moved over to X making support for XFree86 redundant.
If Ubuntu can pull this off and take all the mayor ditros with them then the transition will be smooth, but if we are going to linger on two display servers then we are in for a world of hurt.

 

[hawker]

Great news I think, really looking forward to this!

 

[kingrob]

Also very excited about this!

Go Mark!!

*Tired of tearing on my Ati & nVidia cards in Ubuntu.

 

[hawker]

I'm looking forward to things being more slick and bootiful!