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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Too bad Android diverged too far from the rest of the Linux world and isn't using Wayland.

Interestingly, Wayland is used to some extent in Chrome OS, including for bringing Android apps into the windowing system.

See e.g. https://qiangbo-workspace.oss-cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/2019-...

The implementation includes some interesting projects like Sommelier, a Wayland protocol proxy used as part of a setup to virtualize host resources safely: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA...

Yeah, I've seen that. I wish Android would close that gap and switch to standard Linux stack.

There's a reason it doesn't use the standard Linux stack: the standard Linux stack is a garbage fire. Throwing away the userspace of Linux Desktop and replacing it is what allowed Android to thrive.

There is no reason today, besides historic ones.

Android pre-dates Wayland by a while, so from my understanding, if Android has a solution before, why would it need to migrate to Wayland? Also mobile use-cases and concerns are fairly different from desktop.

> If Android has a solution before, why would it need to migrate to Wayland?

Same reason Ubuntu dropped Mir - synergy.

Wayland is perfectly capable of handling mobile concerns.

For Flutter it doesn't really matter because all it needs is a canvas to paint on.

What is it using?

Its own compositing stack. SurfaceFlinger:

https://source.android.com/devices/graphics/surfaceflinger-w...

That's something I wish they'd replaced with Wayland these days for better affinity with the rest of Linux.

> That's something I wish they'd replaced with Wayland

You might like GNU/Linux phones: Librem 5 and Pinephone.

It'd be nicer if the efforts contributed to a better, more robust Wayland given how much money is invested in Android devices by Google and others.

Librem 5 is interesting. I wish Plasma Mobile project would accelerate though. And SailfishOS never open sourced their UI.

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