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Comment by pkmays | Hacker News Reader

Wayland isn't going to replace X11, it's going to be an alternative to X11.

It's complicated. Wayland can replace some parts of X11 in Linux distributions, but it relies on some other parts of X11 (like libxkbcommon).

I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in

I also think that Wayland will replace X11 in the way that most of the X11 developers will move to Wayland. X11 will still be around, and probably still be supported by window managers for quite a while though.

1. Wayland is actually the protocol/API, which window managers/compositors and the applications that run in them will implement. The reference compositor for the Wayland project is called Weston.

>I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in

This comment must have been submitted from an X11 application running in MacOS X. I am having the s

I'm curious, is the naming related to the two neighboring towns in MA?

As Høgsberg drove through the tiny village of Wayland, Massachusetts, an idea that had been germinating in his mind crystallized. [1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-li...

I believe Wayland's stated goal is exactly that: to replace X11. of course they don't mean they're going to wipe out X11 from existence, if you prefer that you'll still be able to use it, but wayland should eventually be able to completely fill the role that X11 currently fills.

Wayland can eventually fill the role on Linux perhaps. X11 is built to run on many more operating systems.

This is my main issue with Wayland. Whence portability?

Very few apps call the X api directly. Nearly everything uses GTK or Qt, which they'll still be able to do, except that behind the scenes GTK/Qt will hook into Wayland on Linux and X elsewhere.

Wayland for other OSes can be paid for by users of those OSes.

> wayland _should_eventually_ be able to completely fill the role that X11 currently fills.

Which X11 features are still missing? Does Wayland support X11's seemless remote multiuser sessions already?

I've googled around and found this fresh message from April 2012:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/0538250/update-on-wa...

"... X11 support on Wayland. It's basically ready to go, but window management is implemented only as a hack right now."

That doesn't sound good. It seems that Wayland will have a hard time to replace X11 in the next decade. Currently I see no reason why I should switch.

> That doesn't sound good. It seems that Wayland will have a hard time to replace X11 in the next decade. Currently I see no reason why I should switch.

The reason you will switch is that plain X11 goes unsupported and will not work on modern systems.

The initial thing you will switch is not Wayland proper, it's just X11 sitting on top of Wayland. Thinking of Wayland as a competing display server is as of now not really realistic -- it's much better to think it as a refactoring of the internals of the system that uses X and compositors, taking the parts of both that need privileges on the system and really fast communication and merging them together in Wayland, leaving the rest of the parts into X.

We'll see whether Wayland is able to hold what it promises.

Wayland is going to replace portions of X11 pretty much as fast as it can. Basically, the X11 devs want to drop all the parts of the pipeline that Wayland implements from X11 and move to (usermode) X11 on Wayland.

Yep. While it has it good points, it is never going to replace x11 on my laptop since it requires compositing. And i more or less had to turn off compositing on my thinkpad edge since it reduced the akku lifetime drastically and was very noisy.

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