Phoronix: Android Support Removed From Wayland's Weston
The Android back-end for Wayland's Weston compositor is being dropped thereby losing support for Google's mobile operating system on Wayland...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI4Mjk
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Phoronix: Android Support Removed From Wayland's Weston
The Android back-end for Wayland's Weston compositor is being dropped thereby losing support for Google's mobile operating system on Wayland...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI4Mjk
Kill it with fire.
What is the difference of Wayland and the Android display server?
Why were Wayland developed instead of re-use the Android display server on the Linux desktop?
Android's solutions are ad-hock good enough hacks for smartphones. By analogy, Android's solutions are like Chinese crap - it's cheap, good enough, anyone uses it and as time passes it gets mild upgrades to be competitive quality/price wise. But there's better stuff if you have the money and knowledge - e.g. the USA military uses a different type of chips etc. which are more robust and cost a lot more.
Wayland is trying to be not just a cheap mildly good solution for the masses but a really good one, flexible with a well thought design. Android doesn't plan to use Wayland because there's little value for end customers just like you don't need a chip (CPU) which can withstand solar flares. But since the desktop is much more sophisticated and powerful than a smartphone, going after Wayland makes sense for us, desktop users.
The Android backend is Surfaceflinger, which doesn't support windowing, cascading, or a bunch of other critical display server features. They have tacked on windowing support to it, but it is finnicky at best. It also has no networking support, and a while back it was redrawing the entire screen every update.
It makes much more sense to have a comprehensive well thought out display server like Wayland / Weston anyway, because Surfaceflinger was kind of just hacked together.
It's unfortunate that Android isn't a community project, because this is something that would help:
- Make a better Android
- Improve Linux Desktop <---> Android app mobility. (Blur the lines)
- Reduce Duplication of work in this very tricky area. (Faster improvements, more use)
Focus on making Wayland great and a joy to use... Android will eventually come around.