Wayland

Some state-of-the-art progress of the project we’re proudly working with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJB2pznc6iY

A few weeks ago we released Ozone-Wayland and now we’d like to detail for you the development process and strategy behind it… ah, and the title is not developing Chromium, the browser; it’s developing Chromium,** the project**! You will understand why next.

The following message was sent out this morning – I’m copying it here and attaching a cute screenshot of my desktop :) Ozone is a set of C++ classes in Chromium for abstracting different window systems on Linux. It provides abstraction for the construction of accelerated surfaces underlying Aura UI framework, input devices assignment and event handling.

Let’s forget for a second about video drivers, whether it has acceleration or not, and all the related issues with hardware support on Wayland. This is all solved. Let’s talk about the user interface (UI) and ways to customize it all over the computing continuum – from phones, tablets and TV box to desktop PCs, Invehicle Infotainment (IVI), aeroplane systems, among others.

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.

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!