Close on the heels of the controversial announcement two weeks ago that Unity would replace GNOME as the default desktop interface in the next version of Ubuntu, Canonical’s independent streak continued recently with news that it plans to move Ubuntu away from its dependence on X.org. Here are the details, and what this means to Canonical’s larger plans.
Anyone who’s used Linux anywhere in the last 20 or so years is likely familiar with X, the open-source implementation of X11 on top of which most Unix-like operating systems build their graphical user interfaces. While a variety of alternatives to X exist, many of them open-source, all mainstream Linux distributions currently live and love (or not) X. Despite a variety of criticisms that date back to the protocol’s early days, most distribution developers have concluded that it’s better than the alternatives.
Ubuntu, however, stands poised to break that trend by abandoning X in favor of Wayland, a much younger windowing system. Introduced in 2008 by Red Hat engineer Kristian Høgsberg, Wayland attempts to address many of the traditional shortcomings in X–particularly those that are most annoying to desktop users, such as screen redraw issues and the unnecessary bloat associated with the traditional X.org framework.
X to the Wayside
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the Wayland decision on his blog, declining to commit to any specific timeframe for completing the switch to Wayland but pointing at one year as a general goal.
Notably, Shuttleworth was careful to make clear that Ubuntu is by no means ditching X entirely:
We’re confident we’ll be able to retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition that needs to reset the world of desktop free software…X will be around a long time, hence the importance of our confidence levels on the idea of a compatibility environment.
He also made clear, however, that Canonical believes Wayland to be a better candidate for delivering the user experience that Ubuntu developers envision, with the Unity desktop environment and the uTouch input system at its core.
A More Unique Ubuntu?
Considered within the larger context of the recent decision to break with GNOME in favor of Unity, as well as other changes in recent years that have moved Ubuntu farther away from the traditional mainstream Linux software stack, the Wayland announcement underlines Canonical’s vision for setting Ubuntu apart from other Linux distributions. Ubuntu running Unity, with Wayland providing the graphical backend and uTouch supporting a rich set of touchscreen-based input functionality, will look and likely feel much different than Fedora, Suse and other popular open-source operating systems.
Of course, Ubuntu developers have a lot of work ahead if they hope to build a Wayland-based desktop experience that surpasses that of current distributions. Beyond convincing application developers to work with Wayland, the Ubuntu team and its partners will need to adapt a wide range of hardware drivers to support the framework, a task which will require more than a little manpower.
On that latter front, Ubuntu received a bit of a setback on Sunday, when an Nvidia representative announced that the company has “no plans” to support Wayland with its proprietary Unix driver. In theory, that’s not a showstopper because there should be little difficulty converting the open-source nouveau driver to work with Wayland on Nvidia hardware. Unfortunately, however, since nouveau remains in development and still lacks important features–namely, stable support for 3D acceleration–Nvidia’s proprietary driver remains essential for many users.
Of course, a lot could change with nouveau in a year’s time, especially if Ubuntu’s Wayland plans entice more developers to contribute to the project and finally break Nvidia users’ dependence on a closed-source driver. Nvidia could also be convinced to change its mind and support Wayland after all. For now, we’ll wait and see.
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This is an excellent move by Ubuntu. I have been watching Wayland’s progress over the years and am happy to see that someone has the guts to finally get rid of X – X is good and served its function, but there are now better solutions available and there is no need to stick with it anymore.
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I am a long time Linux user and developer – and yes, I do use Ubuntu as my primary desktop OS.
Mark did a great job of grabbing the spotlight here.
There’s plenty of articles, like this one, that praise Canonical for being visionaries here but so far it’s all hype.
So far Canonical hasn’t contributed at all to Wayland, the development that’s happened so far was done by Intel and Red Hat with some other minor contributions.
The reason that Mark can’t give a commitment to when it’ll be in Ubuntu is because he’s got to wait for the other distributions to write the code.
Sadly, once again, Mark tries to take the credit for others work while contributing very little (CODE) back to the community.
Ian: your point is well taken. But it makes me think of Steve Jobs, who’s also adept at taking credit for other people’s work (Apple has UCLA Berkeley to thank for the core of OS X, after all) and spinning it in flashy new ways. Jobs’s policies might not be ethical in the eyes of the free software community, but he has been abundantly successful in the eyes of the world at large.
I often get the sense that Shuttleworth, in a manner similar to Jobs, is focused on making Ubuntu appeal to the world at large more than to the narrow community of open-source hackers. The latter can gripe all they like about how Canonical doesn’t write its own code, etc., but in the end I don’t think either Canonical or most users care.
Chris, I agree. Users don’t care where the innovation comes from – as long as they get a better experience – and that’s the beauty of open source. Canonical does a lot of work to improve the polish and integration that users benefit from.
But I think the comparison of BSD and OS X is a stretch. How different do we think Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora are for example. Are we talking about 2% or 5% maybe in visual differences? Where as BSD and OSX are more like 60% – 80% or more apart?
Maybe this time things will be different, I’d love to see Ubuntu take on the mantel and drive wayland development, but sadly I expect that others such as Intel, Red Hat and Novell will do the work but the press will give Shuttleworth credit.
good move ubuntu. canonical is demonstrating the true spirit of linux. freedom of choice. my laptop loves every ubuntu i have put on it. the janitor at work loves it(and threatened to kiss me for it which isnt much of a thanks). i have windows converts who are using it and even one fella who, at first, just wanted to push buttons, is talking about learning bash! as for the whiners who sing the tired song “ubuntu hasnt written code for us” go take a swim.
do you not know how to compile source code? the linux world is always changing, or should be. the contributions come in many flavors and types. mark has a vision of change and will implement it. he doesnt have to add a single line of code to make a difference.