Unity on WaylandThursday, November

Unity on Wayland
Thursday, November 4th, 2010

The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system. We’d like to embrace Wayland early, as much of the work we’re doing on uTouch and other input systems will be relevant for Wayland and it’s an area we can make a useful contribution to the project.

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. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we’ll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all its GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop. We’ll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there’s no reason for them not to be there on day one either.

Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that :-) but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem. Progress on Wayland itself is sufficient for me to be confident that no other initiative could outrun it, especially if we deliver things like Unity and uTouch with it. And also if we make an early public statement in support of the project. Which this is!

In coming to this view, several scenarios were considered.

One is the continued improvement of X, which is a more vibrant project these days than it once was. X will be around a long time, hence the importance of our confidence levels on the idea of a compatibility environment. But we don’t believe X is setup to deliver the user experience we want, with super-smooth graphics and effects. I understand that it’s *possible* to get amazing results with X, but it’s extremely hard, and isn’t going to get easier. Some of the core goals of X make it harder to achieve these user experiences on X than on native GL, we’re choosing to prioritize the quality of experience over those original values, like network transparency.

We considered the Android compositing environment. It’s great for Android, but we felt it would be more difficult to bring the whole free software stack along with us if we pursued that direction.

We considered and spoke with several proprietary options, on the basis that they might be persuaded to open source their work for a new push, and we evaluated the cost of building a new display manager, informed by the lessons learned in Wayland. We came to the conclusion that any such effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn’t worth the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.

In general, this will all be fine – actually *great* – for folks who have good open source drivers for their graphics hardware. Wayland depends on things they are all moving to support: kernel modesetting, gem buffers and so on. The requirement of EGL is new but consistent with industry standards from Khronos – both GLES and GL will be supported. We’d like to hear from vendors for whom this would be problematic, but hope it provides yet another (and perhaps definitive) motive to move to open source drivers for all Linux work.

Hasil (Bahasa Indonesia) 1:

Unity on WaylandThursday, November 4th, 2010The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system. We’d like to embrace Wayland early, as much of the work we’re doing on uTouch and other input systems will be relevant for Wayland and it’s an area we can make a useful contribution to the project.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. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we’ll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all its GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop. We’ll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there’s no reason for them not to be there on day one either.Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that :-) but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem. Progress on Wayland itself is sufficient for me to be confident that no other initiative could outrun it, especially if we deliver things like Unity and uTouch with it. And also if we make an early public statement in support of the project. Which this is!Datang ke pandangan ini, dianggap beberapa skenario.Salah satunya adalah perbaikan secara terus menerus x, yang merupakan proyek lebih bersemangat hari ini daripada dulu. X akan sekitar waktu yang lama, maka pentingnya tingkat keyakinan kita pada gagasan lingkungan kompatibilitas. Tapi kita tidak percaya X adalah setup untuk pengalaman pengguna yang kita inginkan, dengan grafis Super halus dan efek. Saya mengerti bahwa itu * mungkin * untuk mendapatkan menakjubkan hasil dengan X, tapi itu sangat sulit, dan tidak akan mendapatkan lebih mudah. Beberapa tujuan inti x membuatnya sulit untuk mencapai pengalaman pengguna ini pada X daripada pada asli GL, kami memilih untuk memprioritaskan kualitas pengalaman atas nilai-nilai asli mereka, seperti jaringan transparansi.Kami menganggap lingkungan Composite Android. It's great untuk Android, tapi kita merasa itu akan lebih sulit untuk membawa seluruh perangkat lunak stack bersama kami jika kami mengejar ke arah itu.Kami dianggap dan berbicara dengan beberapa pilihan eksklusif, atas dasar bahwa mereka mungkin membujuk untuk membuka sumber pekerjaan mereka untuk mendorong baru, dan kami mengevaluasi biaya bangunan manajer tampilan baru, diinformasikan oleh pelajaran di Wayland. Kami datang kepada kesimpulan bahwa upaya itu hanya akan menciptakan perpecahan yang sulit di dunia yang tidak sebanding dengan biaya telah melakukan itu. Ada masalah dengan Wayland, tapi mereka tampaknya akan dipecahkan, kami lebih suka menjadi bagian dari memecahkannya daripada mengejar alternatif yang lebih baik. Jadi Wayland.Secara umum, ini semua akan baik-sebenarnya * besar * – bagi orang-orang yang memiliki sumber terbuka baik driver untuk hardware grafis mereka. Wayland tergantung pada hal-hal yang mereka semua bergerak untuk mendukung: kernel modesetting, permata buffer dan seterusnya. Persyaratan EGL baru tapi konsisten dengan standar industri dari Khronos-GLES dan GL akan didukung. Kami ingin mendengar dari vendor untuk siapa ini akan bermasalah, tapi harapan menyediakan namun motif lain (dan mungkin definitif) untuk pindah ke open source driver untuk semua pekerjaan Linux.