Phoronix: GNOME Will Move Full-Speed With Wayland Support
We already know that KDE developers aren't fond of Mir, Canonical's display server for the Unity desktop not derived from X.Org and Wayland. KDE developers aren't happy about it, some Xfce developers have also expressed dissatisfaction with the recent Canonical changes, and now there's a GNOME response. What's GNOME doing about Mir? They're laying out plans right now to move hard and fast with Wayland support!..
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMyNjQ
Exciting times.
do you need the driver to support wayland even if you running just xwayland on top? what about the DE, how much of it has to be ready so that you can run xwayland?
The base of the system has to be supported by the driver.
If your driver supports Wayland, you run Wayland and X-Wayland on top to transparently handle backwards compatibility.
If it doesn't, then you have to run X like normal. However, you can run Wayland as a layer on top of that for Wayland-specific apps if you want to.
I suspect it won't take the NVidia drivers too long to support Wayland, though. They've clearly been looking at EGL support for months, it's just a matter of when it will happen at this point. ATI, of course, who knows. I'm guessing they'll probably make it a priority once NVidia gets support for it, but you never know what's going to happen with those drivers.
I knew it was healthy to have rivalry, despite the many Mir haters. It benefits everyone having Wayland AND Mir. Now us users will get to benefit sooner than any of us anticipated![]()
So they are essentially saying "we should push wayland out with the same timeframe as canonical deploys Mir in a LTS release."
Great news. I'd like to see wayland-based gnome-shell at first.
What if Wayland moves its ass once for all? It is almost vaporware.
One more benefit.
Ubuntu as distro blessed by ValveWILL land in Steam Box. Hence Canonical have BIGGER leverage over AMD/Nvidia to commit to supporting something new in their gpu drivers (or else they risk missing profits from selling GPU's in those Steam Box'es).
Wayland do not have that leverage.
(Tizen will use wayland, but do not know if they choose weston or roll their own solution, and have no idea what requirements there will be for gpu drivers there, nor if Tizen Wayland implementation will be license-compatible with Weston).
So if Weston folks will wont use API's developed for Mir, than we also gain Wayland on proprietary blobs faster.