Release of Wayland 1.0 on the horizon

The developers of Wayland are working towards releasing version 1.0 of the Wayland protocol libraries and Wayland's reference compositor, Weston. In an interview with the organisers of the FOSDEM open source conference, Wayland creator and main developer Kristian Høgsberg explained that with the release of these components, the display system, considered to be the successor to X11, will shed its experimental status. Høgsberg will give a presentation on the development state of Wayland at the conference, which will take place 4 to 5 February, on Saturday afternoon.

The developer said that, with the release of version 1.0, Wayland's core components and developer APIs will be considered stable. In the interview, Høgsberg also mentioned that, while Qt and GTK+ already support Wayland, this support is still a work in progress; for instance, he notes that the developers are currently working on closing the last few gaps in the GTK+ support. Høgsberg, who works for Intel, also explained why he has chosen the MIT licence for the code that was originally licensed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2, saying the would "use a more liberal license that makes adoption easier". He also said that porting Wayland to other Unix derivatives is possible if their basic infrastructure components are similar to those of Linux.

Over a year ago, the developers of Fedora, Ubuntu and various other distributions already stated their intention, in the long term, to switch from X11 to Wayland. These goals could soon become concrete plans. However, it is currently unclear how AMD and NVIDIA will respond to a potentially greater focus on Wayland, because their proprietary graphics drivers only work with X11, not with Wayland. The current versions of the Linux kernel's, and of Mesa 3D's, open source drivers for current PC graphics hardware by AMD, Intel and NVIDIA are all thought to work with Wayland.

(crve)