Wayland is far from complete enough for proper testing in an official package. Drivers are still lacking and most features are still unfinished. It will probably not be even close to being in /testing for upwards estimated of a year or more until the project releases a stable version.

Looks like the "display server war" just started:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/032881.html

Reminds me of "KDE vs. GNOME". That helped Microsoft a lot, too.

How is that ?

I don't see that as a war, it is merely a decision from Intel that they don't want to maintain patches for a one-distro-only solution upstream, those patches belong downstream. Those patches are small and it is Canonical's chosen route to go for their own solution, so of course the burden of maintenance should lie on Canonical's shoulders.

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This.

As for the poll, I'm eager to see what comes of Wayland, but in the end I always stick to what Pat puts out.

Canonical is probably going to have their hands eventually forced into Wayland support (even if a separate build) if XMir doesn't get proper support by hardware vendors.

I don't blame Intel either, because Wayland is an official X.Org project, compared to XMir, which is not.

OEMs will support the official project only, not some fly-by-night one-trick-pony distribution maintainer like Canonical.

I bet, nobody will "win" this and a minimum of three incompatible display servers will be around and make stuff even more complicated for users. By then the Linux desktop will finally be on life support, and even the die-hard enthusiasts will step away from that chaos.

I can also see Valve coming up with their own solution like Google. They will get commercial-grade driver support for sure.

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I kinda like the idea that one can still run X stuff in Wayland. That is for me a good reason to start and try it out a bit (in a vm at first)
Things don't have to be part of the distribution, I add software all the time, so why not the display server.

That X has flaws and a less than optimal design is well-known. However, it does the thing for me (for now). I am not averse to improvements, if they prove to be improvements. And that's something I can decide for myself best...

However, there'd need to be Nvidia drivers :-) That's a bit my issue, as I have an nvidia card...

Valve is heavily involved in the development of SDL, which for many developers is the preferred way to abstract the underlying system. SDL2 has just this week got support for Mir, so that games don't have to care if they run on Wayland or Mir. Developing another solution wouldn't make sense for Valve.

I hear Nvidia is finally providing basic support for Nouveau; maybe with Wayland/Mir approaching, they're rethinking their strategy on driver development?

Nvidia started working with Nouveau because Nouveau is going to be supporting older non-OEM driver supported chipsets, while providing a modern driver for OpenGL and X that is open source license compatible.

Nvidia has already dropped many 6x00/7x00 and earlier era chipsets down to Nouveau support.

Nvidia does nmost of the work in nouveau to have support for Tegra, the desktop chips are not a priority.
Also, unlike AMD, Nvidia supports its legacy chips well, you don't have to use nouveau if you have a Geforce 6000/7000 card.

[Sorry for the late reply, just saw this]

Thanks for the answer. Though while xterm (and maybe xpdf) might get ported, I doubt that most of the X software I use will. ctwm is old (I love old, exotic soft- and hardware), and it does not appear to me that many people are using it. Same with xv or xli/xloadimage. But if xwayland will stay, that is good news, iff Slackware some day switches to it.

They just want to improve the "out of the box experience" with nVidia hardware. Their original plan was, that you use the VESA or EFI framebuffer until you install nVidia's graphics drivers - it works this way on Windows, FreeBSD and Solaris (Nouveau is Linux-only).

But most distributions now force Nouveau even for GUI installers and Live CDs, so it is unstable or crashes before you even have a chance to get the proper drivers installed. And of course people don't blame distributors for that, they blame nVidia.

BTW: Crashes are not the only issue. If some automatically executed experimental rev-engineered code breaks your $1000 card by mis-programming clock generators, voltage converters and fan controllers, exceeding thermal/power limits, no one will pay for it.

So nVidia's efforts are targeted at getting that code stable enough, that a nVidia-powered machine is at least able to boot Linux successfully. They don't have performance or feature-completeness in mind.

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They _should_ blame nVidia.

Remeber .nv? Yes, the project they cut years ago-

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...kills_nv&num=1

As far as I know, TobiSGD is correct, almost all the efforts that nVidia have put into Nouveau is for Tegra.

Yes, they have finally released a few documents to help with Nouveau. So? Its a long time after they stopped developing .nv. Yes, what nVidia wants/'suggests' is that you use VESA until you can install the closed source drivers. That shows a limited understanding and/or empathy with the whole idea of open source.....and IMO if Linus hadn't done a bit of name calling they might not have even released the minor documentation to help nouveau.

Anyone running a Titan, Tesla or 'top end' Quadro isnt going to want nouveau. Not much point 'crippling' a $1000 card. Anyway, if its not being used for 'professional' reasons, a $1000 is card is an idiot move. Even a GTX780 is less than $750, and only numbercrunching freaks or hardcore gamers with a good job or rich family would get one of them.

nVidia should know what the situation is, they obviously knew in the past, or else they would never have made the .nv driver.

Is it really too much to ask for decent open source drivers?