The new display servers

Summary

In the past, several projects have attempted to replace the aged X Window System, including Y and Fresco [24]. The chances for Wayland are good, however. The X11 successor has received broad support from industry leaders, such as Intel and Red Hat, as well as projects such as Gnome and KDE. Even NVidia has approached the Wayland developers about providing support. The previous level of development looks promising under Fedora, and KDE is already relatively usable with Wayland. However, the biggest disadvantage of Wayland is in the lack of network transparency.

Mir cannot offer network transparency either. Although it has demonstrated its everyday usability on smartphones, Mir still has not arrived on the desktop. The fact that Canonical is largely creating Mir single-handedly is probably one reason for the long development. Since even major Ubuntu derivatives have come out in favor of Wayland, Mir is likely to remain an isolated solution, at least for the time being.

Infos

  1. Wayland: https://wayland.freedesktop.org
  2. Phoronix, Michael Larabel, "Wayland: A New X Server For Linux": http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xorg_wayland&num=1
  3. Wayland support in GTK: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GTK%2B
  4. EGL: https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-egl-1.5-specification
  5. Vulkan 1.0 spec with Wayland support: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2016/02/16/vulkan-1.0-specification-released-with-day-one-support-for-wayland/
  6. Wayland documentation: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/
  7. KDE Neon: https://neon.kde.org
  8. RebeccaBlackOS: https://sourceforge.net/projects/rebeccablackos/
  9. Martin Gräßlin, "To EGLStream or not": https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2016/09/to-eglstream-or-not/
  10. Unix Device Memory Allocation: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-October/120067.html
  11. Unix Device Memory Allocator: https://github.com/cubanismo/allocator
  12. Wayland support for proprietary NVidia drivers: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=773629
  13. Remote Wayland: https://github.com/kempj/remote-wayland
  14. Wayland Remoting: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/Remoting
  15. Mark Shuttleworth, "Unity on Wayland": http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
  16. Oliver Ries, "Taking Unity to the next level": https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-March/036776.html
  17. Mir specification: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec
  18. Mir on Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/mir
  19. Mir release 0.18: http://kdubois.net/2015/12/22/new-mir-release-0-18/
  20. Ubuntu SDK: https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/phone/platform/sdk/
  21. Ubuntu Gnome FAQ: https://ubuntugnome.org/documentation/faq/
  22. Mir Kiosk Snaps: https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/guides/mir-snaps/
  23. Matthew Garrett, "Mir, the Canonical CLA and skewing the playing field": http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html
  24. Fresco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresco_(windowing_system)

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