As recently announced by Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu will be moving towards using Wayland as its display manager.
What are biggest differences between X11 and Wayland? Why will Wayland make Ubuntu better?
Ubuntu – Why is Wayland better
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guiwaylandxorg
As recently announced by Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu will be moving towards using Wayland as its display manager.
What are biggest differences between X11 and Wayland? Why will Wayland make Ubuntu better?
Best Answer
You can see the Wayland architecture page to see how it differs in design. It's supposed to simplify the whole graphics stack by forcing everything through a standard GEM/DRM stack straight into the kernel and managing compositing itself.
Compare that to the X stack where you have bits and bobs all over the place. Some of the X mess has been through flexible design, some have been growing pains. All the compositors (Compiz/Metacity/Mutter/KWin/etc) have been added as an afterthought. They are, at their core, hacks to do what X should probably be doing itself. If things carry on expanding outwards like they have been, we'll get to a point where the project become unmaintainable.
All in all, when hardware support is there, it should make the whole stack more efficient and less painful to use in standard setups.
However there are a couple of issues that I haven't seen remedies for so far:
X is pretty network-aware. You can send windows to other computers, you can have multiple screens with remote logins and all sorts of funky things like that. This might seem fairly specialist but it's widely used technology. Wayland appears fairly local and static in comparison.
There's also driver support. Closed-source drivers are yet to support the KMS/shared-GEM/shared-DRM technologies that Wayland thrives upon. A purist might be okay with Nouveau but somebody who pays £100-400 on a high performance 3D graphics card won't be happy with the flaky poor 3d performance they'd get with the current open driver.
Update: Nvidia is working to support both Wayland and Mir.
2018 update. 17.10 used Wayland as the default display server (unless you had a closed driver, or a driver that didn't support it, or needed X). 18.04 and 18.10 both use X as global default (though you can install Wayland).
I'm not in charge of anything but from this position, it seems like we're still a metric Nvidia away from getting real traction. Until that point, I don't think we're going to see enough mindshare and developing power get behind Wayland. The gaming/performance market is using X. The MCE market are using X (and direct framebuffers). I'm not sure Wayland will ever have a real chance.