Comment by green7ea
13 years ago
This post seems to be slightly misinformed about Wayland. I can't say much about Mir as I'm not as familiar with it.
1. You can use OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Software, etc. to render windows in Wayland and most likely in Mir.
2. 2D acceleration depends on the widget toolkit and not Wayland. Wayland doesn't do 2D acceleration or need to do so since it is only responsible for compositing windows (which is as fast in 3D). If 2D acceleration is used to draw these windows, it isn't affected by the use of Wayland or X11 in any way. Wayland has a public mailing list that has much more reliable info than Phoronix and LWN.
3. This is probably the most interesting point raised. Providing xrandr functionality in wayland is much easier than in X11. This is because you have to support a lot of legacy features in X11 that you don't in Wayland.
4 (I added this one) Throughout the article, he seems to assume that no drivers will support Wayland. Wayland was buit to reuse most of the X11 drivers by being able to use DRI2. Mir seems to be able to take this one step further by being able to leverage existing Android drivers (there was a prototype of this in Wayland a while back).
I would like to finish by saying that I agree with the premise but not for the reasons given. The reason you won't see Wayland and Mir in a distro this year is because X11 is tried and tested. You don't replace something that critical to the user experience on a whim: you make sure it works and works for everyone first. Having said that, you will see Wayland and/or Mir faster than you'd expect.
I completely agree. Some interesting factoids:
1. Arch already has Wayland in its official repositories.
2. KDE already has preliminary support
3. Intel is driving Wayland development, so integrated cards will likely work without a hitch
4. Systemd was another large change with lots of FUD, and it's already default in high-profile distros (OpenSUSE, Fedora and soon RHEL 7). Even Canonical's on board.
This article is mostly FUD. I think we'll see a relatively stable KDE on Wayland this year. I doubt the Wayland team is that optimistic, but it's moving at an incredible pace.
I actually ran wayland on my laptop a few days ago. I'd be prepared to try switching full time once they let me configure my touchpad.
As for acceleration - you can actually run wayland on fbdev with a fully software compositor. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like E18 running as a sw compositor for wayland.