Slashdot Linux Story | Ubuntu Dumps X For Unity On Wayland
Another big chance by Ubuntu. God, you got to love’em.
Is X really that bad or is Wayland really that great. Well at least some new changes with some new bugs. 
Ubuntu is moving the direction Google moved with Chrome. This time I think they expect KDE and GNOME to follow though. In reality Ubuntu gives very little back to the Linux community.
I enjoy me current state of buggyness thank you very much 
Actually the X protocol is getting a bit tired and experimentation with alternatives is welcome. Wayland is not the first attempt at reworking the display system. Already platforms like mobile devices are using other solutions. There will be layers of abstraction of course.
Well it has to do openGL and 3D to work for me. I would love in to not even think about video configuration. People do however need and use the x server. x does lots of stuff.
You are quite right. There was a project some time ago called Y windows, but I guess that died. Oh well.
Well, Mark himself sounds a bit mad when someone relates Canonical very hard to contributes something to the communities. lol! lemme re-quote the statements between Christoph and Mark.
Christoph says: (permalink)
November 5th, 2010 at 10:34 am
@Martin: Nobody is leaning on Canonical to do everything, it’s about contributing something.
Canonical hardly ever contributed something to X.org. At the Ubucon in Göttingen it was decided that they go for plymouth, but instead of helping to get KMS into the graphics drivers, Canonical let others do the work while their developers were spending their time on fixing things for proprietary drivers:
“I pretty much ended up spending 100% of my time between release
and UDS on SRU bugs (mainly for -nvidia), and still there are a number
that could be put in.”
taken from Congrats on karmic, looking forward lucidSo obviously Canonical does have developer resources, but they have wrong priorities. In the end it was (mainly) Red Hat that did the work and when it was done, Ubuntu made the switch
I seriously hope this time Canonical will do better and contribute something to Wayland.
And what Mark has responded …
@Christoph
Fixing bugs that make the free software desktop “just work” for the people who use it, is an important contribution. Even if that means fixing bugs in the cases where people are using proprietary drivers – because while it may surprise you to learn this, MOST users with that hardware, do. And those users are just as important as your opinions as to what other people should do with their time and money.
If you don’t want to use Unity, or Bazaar, or Launchpad, or uTouch, or Upstart, or any of the other unique projects Canonical leads and maintains, that’s fine. But you’re fooling yourself if you think that it’s reasonable to say that Canonical doesn’t contribute, or that the contributions of any other company are morally superior. Everyone scratches their itch, everyone works on the things they are inspired by or earn money from or have a strategic interest in.
It would be easy to find things to pick on our competitors about. But that’s not our style. And I don’t think it’s a style which helps the open source movement grow. I don’t agree with many things I see in other communities, but I figure it’s better to let them move forward with the things they are interested in, than whine at them to think the way I do. You might want to consider whether statements like yours are justifiable and appropriate.
Mark
All can be read here at Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Unity on Wayland
Mark can say whatever he wants about how much work they put into making it “just work” but it’s BS. I used to run Kubuntu on my laptop which has an Intel GMA 4500 GPU. In the last TWO releases (10.04 & 10.10) the X server would only start up properly about 1/2 the time or so, resulting in many reboots. I left Ubuntu for OpenSuse a little bit after 11.3 came out so I was using 10.10 Alpha or Beta. Maybe they fixed the problem before they shipped, I don’t know. I’ve had to get over some of OpenSUSE’s quirks but overall I really like it. Ubuntu doesn’t give a **** about KDE users and I’ve been looking for a good KDE focused distro. Fedora’s KDE support has been pretty lacking and they tend to be a little too much on the bleeding edge. Also they are a little too insistent on not running proprietary stuff. Sorry but I don’t care about the ideology, I need Flash and working graphics drivers and DVD playback and other things. It’s not quite as easy on OpenSuse as on Ubuntu but with a little Googling I’m able to get what I want. I love the one click install, makes things nice and easy. I’d love to see Wayland on OpenSuse when it makes sense, but until then I want a solid working KDE desktop.
Unfortunately I did have some trouble with dual head on my laptop which I reported in bug 633044. It was actually caused by a fix to bug 617530 which was pretty bad. I was able to fix it by using the intel_legacy driver, which is “not recommended” but it actually works. I don’t like stale software but I also need my computer to work.
OpenSuse 11.3 is working fantastically on my new AMD+Nvidia system. 