Wayland 1.0 release is knocking the door and people keep asking “why Wayland if we got X already”, or things like performance, memory consumption, power savings and other kind of advantages on having Wayland instead X. Those are very important points to consider, of course, but for one individual actually programming the graphics system the answer should be straightforward: Wayland API is damn small.
1. But who’s going to program Wayland or X?
A rather cool feature on Weston compositor is xwayland, to support X11 native applications on Wayland. It’s a quite important feature because gives the compatibility with the “old” windowing system, so say you have an application written on Motif/Xt or even something more “fancy” like a Web browser all tied with GTK2 and whatever dependency, then you better not bother yourself re-writing it to native Wayland or porting to a modern toolkit – it should just work seamlessly on it. Hence, X on Wayland fits pretty well with our overall transition plan.
Do you wanna contribute to a funky open-source project? Are you tired of your nerdy and boring community of developers? Are you the one that wants to get rid of X because it’s a giant, old and fat dinosaur in your system? :) Cool, I have a project to solve your problems!
While there’s still lot of churn in the protocol, and yet our goal is soon to wrap up all we’ve been doing to a steady and settle-on-the-stone one description, there’s a lot on the implementation side that needs love. And that mainly concern Weston compositor, which is becoming the de facto compositor on several systems targeting Wayland.
To run Qt applications on Wayland is fairly simple nowadays. Thank to Qt developers, they are following up quite well our last changes on Wayland protocol and updating accordingly on Qt5 code base – by the way, the fresh and just released Qt 4.8 does not ship the latest protocol additions, so that’s not the one I’m referring.
So, today I’ve set up the last bits of Qt environment on my Intel Pine-Trail pretty easy (yeah, I compile on my tablet :-O). You don’t need to clone the whole data base for starting hacking on it. Let’s see.
Hello Intel Finland :) Here I am now; four months already at OTC big team.
Actually this is not a big news but it’s nice to see on practice X being used on the advanced age :) Here I’ve played with some UI configuration settings, browsed for while, toyed with facebook, opened some photos in the viewer and etc, all for about 5 minutes:
and zooming in the X11 core slice we have:
