Ubuntu goes Wayland

Daniel Stone

Ubuntu’s decision to move back to a GNOMEbased desktop will have ramifications for years to come. For user experience, unifying the desktops means combining forces and eliminating duplicated effort. For developers, a lot of the differences in APIs such as indicators, menus, and scrollbars could now come to an end, making Linux an easier target for ISVs. Not to mention that we are back to only supporting two window systems: Wayland and legacy X11.

With Ubuntu following Fedora’s lead in shipping Wayland-based GNOME for 18.04, all major distros will reap the benefits of the work done to Wayland, EGL, and Vulkan across the board. And we’ll undoubtedly see more focus on improving and extending Wayland.

But you may be surprised with continuity, and just how much of the graphics infrastructure is common. When I started working on X11 nearly 15 years ago, the idea of a fork or alternate window system was unthinkable. Not just because the drivers and platform specifics were tied up in the XFree86/X.Org servers, but the toolkits too: much of the big breakage between GTK+ 2.x and 3.x was removing X11 implementation details from the toolkit API.

However, 2017 is a different time. KMS provides device-independent display control, Vulkan and EGL provide GPU acceleration across multiple window systems, xkbcommon provides keyboard infrastructure, and logind lets us do all this without being root. GBM allocates graphics buffers, and the universal allocator being designed by the whole community including Nvidia, will join the family.

As Mir also relied on these, the change is less seismic than you might think. From this point of view, nothing changes: we continue to cooperate on the bedrock infrastructure borne of X.Org’s incredibly long-sighted view that it had a duty to make itself replaceable. Daniel Stone, Graphics Lead, Collabora Ltd.