Remote Viewing-Not Just a Psychic Power

This article is brand new and almost obsolete, as it talks about X forwarding. Several distros are eliminating X pretty soon in favor of Wayland, so it remains to be seen how well X forwarding will work; supposedly, X will still be there, but as an additional service. But then again, Linux distros these days seem to do a terrible job of handling any kind of transition, so I wouldn't bet on that actually working.

You are getting more than a little ahead of yourself here.

Have you used a Wayland-Only system yet? Only desktop I've seen running on it so far is Razor QT and it lacks many applications that are still X-only.

Beyond that using Wayland over X still doesn't seem to offer any new/useful features.

Finally, nvidia (and odds are ATI as well) have no plans to support anything other than X - so that means those of us that like our full-3D on our Linux machines will be sticking with X regardless.

~Jeff

Haven't tried one yet, but they're supposed to handle X applications by running X on top of Wayland. There's no such thing as Wayland-over-X that I'm aware of, as Wayland is the lower layer. Nvidia and ATI will have to move to Wayland whether they like it or not, because the distros are going that way, or else they'll become irrelevant.

I'll make a prediction NVIDIA will eventually support Wayland regardless of their stated position right now.

As for ATI who cares, their present Catalyst support of X is quite frankly abysmal and not likely to change in the near future so I suspect Wayland will be just a step to far for them. ATI have very little interest in truly supporting Linux and unless anyone can present real evidence to the contrary I don't see this changing.

Like Jeff, I believe Wayland has an extremely long way to go in gaining acceptance and I know that I myself will not accept Wayland unless it has proper driver support from the likes of NVidia so I also predict X still has quite a future ahead of it especially if my first prediction is completely wrong.

@Koriel: The main problem is what the distros do. If all the distros switch wholesale to Wayland, even without Nvidia support, then users will have a choice: stick with an old distro (and all the old software versions that entails, and lack of support for newer hardware too), or move to the new distro version and lose the Nvidia binary driver. I don't see this ending well.

@Khamul Agreed if all distro's move to Wayland then their might be a problem but I don't believe all will, a lot of distro's will hold of until proper driver support is there.

Some distro's will rush in there such as Fedora but others such a PCLinuxOS, Mint, Slackware and even Ubuntu will hold off as DE's such as KDE and Unity without proper hardware/driver support will have a good deal of their "Bling Functionality" hamstrung without full hardware acceleration.

Its just going to be a waiting game and a very long one at that and may even be mute if Wayland do deliver the X as a service support.

As the maintainer of a small distro I can say that there will be at least one distro that will be sticking to X unless nvidia changes their mind and starts providing drivers for Wayland.

I gotta have my Starcraft 2 - and for that I need nvidia drivers :)

~Jeff

Ubuntu has a history of holding back even on X, on a couple of occasions already they have held back using the latest X because DAMMIT didnt have a driver ready and this is the sort of action we can expect with Wayland if the drivers aren't ready for it then I can't see any distro worth its salt supporting it until the major drivers are there.

Wayland's success will be down to driver support and I hope the drivers will be there as I think Wayland is the way to go tech wise.