Linked by the_randymon on Wed 9th Jan 2013 00:48 UTC
Lead developer for Compiz, Sam Spilsbury, says he sees little need to develop Compiz for Wayland due to the increasing fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. Spilsbury writes "What does compiz actually provide to users of these systems? [...] None of this functionality that user wants really depends on our compositing engine. There's nothing so special about our compositing engine that gives it a reason to exist [...] This is the real practical toll of fragmentation amongst the Linux ecosystem. It's not just that there are multiple implementations of the wheel. There are multiple implementations of entire cars which do almost the same thing, but a little different from everyone else. Some say this is the free software's greatest strength. Now that I know the personal and technical toll of fragmentation, I see it as its greatest weakness."
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/14/13 18:22 UTC, submitted by MOS6510
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Someone who makes this comparison in this context has absolutely zero idea why Wayland was written in the first place and how it differentiates from X11.
Wayland is a complete NEW design, porting Compiz to X11 would not only mean a lot work but it's also completely pointless. Wayland itself is designed already to be compositing right from the start. And for people who still haven't grasped the concept: compositing has NOTHING to do with 3D animations and wobbly windows, but it is required to generate these effects.
Compositing is an alternative, better concept to draw windows on a screen as compared to the old, stacking window managers. MacOS uses compositing since 2001 (first release of MacOS X) and Windows since Vista (with the new WDDM display driver model).Compositing simply means that every content is rendered off-screen first, then the window manager composes the desktop (as opposed to stacking window managers which lets application directly draw on the desktop).
Everyone who still thinks that X11 is a good concept that should be persued in the future, should have a look at these pages:
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
Adrian
Edited 2013-01-09 10:34 UTC