[conspire] (forw) Re: Unity on Wayland

[Rick Moen]

My take on recent graphical-desktop news.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:00:49 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: [my friend]
Subject: Re: Unity on Wayland
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting [my friend]:

> Mark Shuttleworth has announced on his blog
> (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551) that Ubuntu is going to
> migrate to an OpenGL based display manager called Wayland and that an
> X-Window compatibility layer will be included to run X apps. Canonical
> is now referring to the Ubuntu desktop as "Unity". He says he expects
> it to take about one year to make the transition to Wayland.

Actually, Unity is a multitouch-capable desktop environment wrapped
around Novell/SUSE's Compiz 3D-compositing window manager, and is their
answer to the standard GNOME D.E. sofware suite, which currently is
their D.E.  wrapped around Metacity.  That is, Unity will (when
complete) become Ubuntu's implementation of GNOME 3.0.

For 2011, the GNOME people intend to release GNOME 3.0 using 'GNOME Shell' 
as the basic UI, that being a replacement for their old desktop metaphor
implementation.  'GNOME Shell', in turn, is software superstructure atop
an extensible compositing window manager named Mutter, which in turn
employs an OpenGL display engine for 3D compositing called 'Clutter
Toolkit'.

The Ubuntu people had a falling out with the GNOME folks over the GNOME
3.0 / GNOME Shell / Mutter strategy, as they considered Mutter to have
poor performance compared to Compiz, and GNOME Shell to make relatively
poor use a screen space, especially for netbooks.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/102610-is-unity-the-right-interface.html


The intended downplaying of X11 in favour of a Wayland-based layer is very
interesting.  Wayland's hardly the first would-be escape route from X11
ugliness, but I give this one a good chance of actually working,
especially as the author's no slouch, having been the guy responsible
for AIGLX.



----- End forwarded message -----