I laughed uproariously when the news filtered down to me, that Ubuntu was shifting its carcass toward Wayland, as opposed to the ancient monolith Xorg.
The rationale, as I understand it, goes mostly hand-in-hand with the press for Ubuntu to become something less than a desktop, and more of a clicky buttony thingy that hooks into Facebookendsterwitterspace.
That’s fine. It’ll be interesting to watch, but you know what? I think I will sit this one out.
Not for any dislike of Ubuntu, or distrust for the direction it is moving. You might call me old-fashioned, if only because the clicky buttony thingy doesn’t really turn me on. I’ll take a traditional desktop, any day.
Of course, if I had an interest beyond the computers of the last century, I might be willing to just try it out. Might be.
But ay, there’s the rub: Whether Ubuntu uses Xorg or Wayland or a day-old ham sandwich to project its graphical interface is hardly any interest of mine.
I learned a long time ago that I could move closer to my goals by omitting X altogether. When I jettisoned the aging, bloated crowbait, life suddenly turned beautiful.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Stepping away from X made everything better, and I heartily recommend it.
I’ll be honest, I still use it from time to time. I do have machines that predate contemporary framebuffer support, and in those situations, a very sparse version of Xorg is what saves it from giant-size block letters smeared across the LCD. 😯
But I won’t pretend to care much if Xorg’s 25-year legacy is slowly and painfully extracted from Ubuntu or Fedora or Distro X. And oh yes, it will be painful … for someone, somewhere you can bet it will be painful.
No pain for me though. I will be the one on the sidelines, with the look of zen on my face, wondering what the big deal is. 
Motho ke motho ka botho 
oh it will hurt allright, but not to me! not that I care since I’m an archer but I think it’s time X takes a nap (forever) with it’s friend HAL ;D
still don’t get the deal with twitter/fb… if this keeps going, Ubuntu will be a mobile phone OS inside a desktop/laptop computer
Well, at least Ubuntu is the first one that takes measures to make X retire. Not a single other distro has even started to take steps in another direction.
And it’s true that most people use their pc for communication and social networking. I really think Ubuntu is going the right way.
Being the most popular always comes with a lot of critics.
Although I agree that Archers can watch and see what’ll happen from a safe distance 😉
Eventually, Canonical will either abort their move to Wayland or most distros will follow.
To each his/her own, as always. To me, this is a very exciting time. Everything from Unity to Wayland is very bold move and, as someone who studied economics, I can only applaud this.
Finally, there will at least be some difference between the multitude of Linux distributions out there. And finally Ubuntu breaks from the rest of the herd instead of implementing their own ideas and then getting slandered by others because “they don’t follow the rest of the gang”.
People still miss the point of Free Software, which includes freedom of choice. I’ll say it clearly:
Linux is Not Gnome.
Linux is Not Unity.
Linux is Not Ubuntu.
inspirational 😀
You are right. I should give Ubuntu at least a small tip of the hat, for taking the first step. Like it or not, at least Ubuntu isn’t afraid to step outside the 25-year-old box. 😐
Freedom of choice time I guess.
CentOS 6 will have updates for almost as long as the next windows release takes to arrive 🙂
Wow, you don’t like either? You are SO edgy! I want to have your kids!
@el mariachi
Call me nitpicky but as i see it now ubuntu hasn’t done anything towards wayland migration except that Mark S. blog mentioning this. As it is right now ubuntu takes something that was already created and makes it as if ubuntu did the hard work (understandable as in my eyes they are a marketing company like apple). If they will employ additional developer full time for wayland then i can say they’ve done something but right now they’ve done nothin.
very true! maybe I gave the sense of not thinking likewise 😛
I hope they contribute some code to the project, because X sure isn’t the future.
I believe canonical isn’t evil (yet?) so this may be the push Wayland and the Linux Desktop experience needs
Shuttleworth is going to ditch one thing that has really bad connotations, and what I mean is Linux. Notion about Linux is that it is overly complicated, not suitable for desktop, lacks anything close to killer app, and last but not least, scares live shit out of avarge computer user.
IMO ubuntu will have to evolve as far away from “vanilla” stack as possible in order to distinguish itself from “linux croud”. It can’t be just orange paint covered Debian. More Android way..
Betting on Wayland is one of handful of means to achieve that.
What’s more, in future one might have to port its apps, perfectly working on Linux, to Ubuntu.
BTW, did you know that xorg.conf.d in ubuntu is in /usr/share/X11 ??wow !!!