Debian is undoubtedly one of the most famous and loved Linux distributions by the community. Be it for its monstrous stability or for being the «mother» of an infinite number of distributions. Known for “taking it easy”, Debian is cautious about incorporating new technologies into the project. However it seems that with Wayland it will be different.
Wayland is a window composer, let’s say that thanks to him you can see the graphical interface. Its predecessor, Xorg, is widely used in most Linux distributions (Android and Chrome OS are off that list), but it seems that Wayland has been gaining its space.
Wayland on Debian 10
Unlike the systemd boot system, Wayland will be adopted «almost immediately» if we consider how conservative Debian is. The announcement was made by Red Hat software engineer Jonathan Michael Thomas, reported on the JMTD website.
The final decision was not arbitrary, but based on two issues.
Debian Buster chose to bring Gnome-Shell as the standard desktop environment (are even reevaluating this issue in the Jessie version of Debian);
The Gnome team chose to offer Wayland by default, so the Debian team decided to meet the Gnome positioning.
Another reason is due to the technology features and code that is more understandable (and easy to maintain).
Wayland mature enough?
Many claim that Wayland is not stable enough, and full of bugs. It is evident that it has some problems with software such as Synaptic and OBS Studio. We have to consider that with Wayland a lot has changed compared to Xorg, and some incompatibilities are expected. However it seems that they are working to make Wayland compatible, instead of making it impossible to use it or even removing it from the repositories (the incompatible applications that are there).
As any and all new technology requires a “little push” for its adoption, who knows now that more Linux systems are bringing the Wayland session as standard (Fedora say so ?), the technology will evolve. Or companies like Nvidia, start paying attention and making their drivers compatible (At the moment only Nouveau works with Wayland, meaning briefly: “Nadica de gameplays hardcores”).
And what did you think about Wayland coming as the default for Debian 10?
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