Hutterer: Is Wayland Ready Yet?

Linux input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat has followed up with another blog post since his X.Org project vs. X.Org Foundation post from a few days ago. Today he looks at the question of "is Wayland ready yet?"

His post doesn't really provide any new details concerning the state of Wayland itself or projects making use of Wayland, but rather to clarify the terminology and question around it. He wrote:

The protocol is stable and has been for a while. But not every compositor and/or toolkit/application speak Wayland yet, so it may not be sufficient for your use-case. So rather than asking "Is Wayland ready yet", you should be asking: "Can I run GNOME/KDE/Enlightenment/etc. under Wayland?" That is the right question to ask, and the answer is generally "It depends what you expect to work flawlessly." This also means "people working on Wayland" is often better stated as "people working on Wayland support in ....".

An exception to the above: Wayland as a protocol defines what you can talk about. As a young protocol (compared to X with 30 years worth of extensions) there are things that should be defined in the protocol but aren't yet. For example, Wacom tablet support is currently missing. Those are the legitimate cases where you can say Wayland isn't ready yet and where people are "working on Wayland". Of course, once the protocol is agreed on, you fall back to the above case: both sides of the equation need to implement the new protocol before you can make use of it.

You can read his post in full via his personal blog.