It Looks Like Canonical Is Still Committed To Wayland On Ubuntu 17.10

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 3 August 2017 at 08:43 AM EDT. 44 Comments
UBUNTU
There has been some mixed messages by Ubuntu developers in recent weeks about the default GNOME Shell session planned for Ubuntu 17.10 and whether Wayland would be used. The latest is that Wayland-by-default is still on.

Fresh from GUADEC, Canonical employee Didier Roche blogged today about his experience at the annual GNOME conference.

At GUADEC the Ubuntu developers along with upstream GNOME developers were able to figure out more about what their default plans are. This also includes moving the window controls back to the right of the window, rather than the left as it's been the past few years on Ubuntu with Unity. Didier commented, "Also, the default session will have our Ambiance GTK theme (including Shell), icon theme and ubuntu font by default. Applications control buttons will be …drum rolls… on the right1, with a minimize, maximize and close buttons! This vision is more compatible with having a dock always visible by default, while following more closely GNOME design for button placement. We want to keep those behavior changes like nautilus showing icons on the desktop as minimal as possible, and we are working upstream discussing all this, porting some of the changes and benefits discussed in the Unity experience back to GNOME when desired."

The Ubuntu changes will also be implemented as a GNOME Shell mode so users can switch to another session if preferring a more "upstream" or "stock" experience.

In regards to Wayland by default, the Canonical developer commented, "Oh, one last thing… we are going to switch over Wayland by default on 17.10. The Xorg session will still be available alongside. This enables us to get some good set of feedback to be ready and make our final decision for our next LTS, 18.04."

That's great to hear. Of course, the X.Org session will be useful in situations of unsupported hardware/drivers. With using Fedora Workstation extensively, the Wayland experience has been quite solid through all of my testing and will begin running some Ubuntu 17.10 daily tests soon.

More details via this blog post.
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