Will Wayland be backward compatible with X11 applications?

[fernandoc1]

I interested in the way that wayland will render our desktops, but I fear that it is not X11 backward compatible.
Another question is: will Wayland demand new device drivers, or the current can be used on it?

[bridgman]

Wayland is designed to use existing KMS/DRI2/Mesa device drivers, but is not designed to run existing X11 applications (unless you run X over Wayland).

[fernandoc1]

Then wayland should work in a way near what we have now with Mac OS X?
Another question: does current nvidia and ati drivers will be compatible with wayland?
I fear we lose support to old hardware in the case of an substitution of X11 for wayland

[pingufunkybeat]

Wayland can't be "backward compatible" with X11 since Wayland has absolutely nothing to do with X11. It's a separate development, and it's pretty much a tech experiment.

It should be working with pretty much with the same drivers as now, since the drivers are becoming rather independent from X. But whether it will ever replace X, or whether it will even be better than X in some distant future is a big open question.

[nanonyme]

Then wayland should work in a way near what we have now with Mac OS X?
Another question: does current nvidia and ati drivers will be compatible with wayland?
I fear we lose support to old hardware in the case of an substitution of X11 for wayland

Open drivers probably yes, blobs not very likely. I doubt there will be a change in near future.

[elanthis]

Open drivers probably yes, blobs not very likely. I doubt there will be a change in near future.

It really shouldn't be too difficult overall to get it running on blobs, or even whole other OSes. While there is (I think) a current dependency on DRI2/DRM, the core meat of everything Wayland needs from the graphics driver is EGL and OpenGL.

[NoEffex]

I dislike X11 (it was great back in it's hayday..but nowadays it isn't necessary), however it's main design reflects the graphics-acceleration-less past.

Wayland is graphics-acceleration-full. So, I really don't mind dropping X11. The APIs change daily regardless, so it's not that big of a change.