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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Not sure how you can make that claim, given that Wayland currently has no support whatsoever for network transparency, and no plans beyond "do something at the compositor level". "
Easy: the Wayland protocol is based on sending buffers (images) between programs(clients) and the server, so once you're at the 'compositor level' the only thing you can work on are images.
For applications which works mostly with text, sending 'raw' images will use much more bandwidth than X Render's way of rendering (send the glyph once, then send commands to draw text, reusing many times the glyphs).
If is of course possible to compress images to reduce bandwidth but this requires a lot of processing and adds latency..