Thought I post another update with some more news on what we are doing here at Red Hat in preparation for our continued push forward for Wayland on Fedora. Peter Hutterer posted his first draft of the Wayland protocol extension to handle Wacom tablets, you can find more details in his Google Plus post. This effort is also a good illustration of our approach to the Wayland switchover, it is not just about working on some high level bits to port them over to existing APIS or protocols provided by Kristian Høgsberg and the other core Wayland devs, but actively contributing to the whole stack where needed.
Giovani Campagna continued his great work on porting the needed GNOME stack over, with his patches to Clutter now being available in a release.
Our biggest challenge currently is with XWayland, due to some internal projects that had to get priority we have not had the amount of time we hoped to worked on it yet, but we hope to rally a bit in order to get it to a state in F20 where we can at least have our GDM Wayland session working.
I would also like to point out that I seen some headlines around the web where people are excited about the Wayland work happening in Fedora and around GNOME 3.10. And it is exciting as things are falling into place very fast these days for Wayland, but still I ask people to keep their cool a bit as we are branding it a tech preview in F20 for a reason. So for developers we hope that this tech preview will provide an easy to use harness for running Wayland and testing your applications against Wayland, but in no way is this tech preview going to be something that an end user would even want to run. So when I see Slashdot headlines like “GNOME 3.10 Is Now Properly Supported On Wayland” I get a little worried because to me such a headline implies that things are in a much more mature state than they actually are. Our expectation and hope is to have something that can be considered fully working and ready for end users in the Fedora 21 and GNOME 3.12 timeframe, and that is the releases in which I feel such headlines are likely to be warranted.
So yes, the Wayland stuff we are working is cool and I think we have some killer features planned to be deployed on top of it, but lets do this right and not jump the gun here.
Thank you very much for all the work on you (plural) are putting into this. I feel that “but actively contributing to the whole stack where needed” really illustrates why Red Hat ist a good citizen in the open source community.
Also I like your “engineering mentality” when you point out likely shortcomings of early Wayland previews even though I’m sure that won’t stop Phoronix’ (et al) sensational headlines.
Maybe a “Technological Preview” stamp could be printed all over the wallpaper when running in Wayland session?
How did you get into management with all your sobering reality? :)
How about someone at RedHat working on remote support?
As a developer, half of the windows on my desktop are not really applications running on my workstation… They are from my development VMs by the good old “ssh -X”. (The stuff I’m working with is WAY to complex to set up, and would mess up my workstation seriously.)
As an IT manager, I oversee a few ten thousand workstations in heterogeneous environment. We are using Citrix heavily to bring some applications that would be too hard to get running on desktops remotely to users. Also, we are using it to overcome the fact that most of those applications require specific Windows versions… We could do similar things again by “ssh -X” or with rdesktop.
But, we can’t do (need pam/SSO, root windowless mode – screw performance) any of that stuff with Wayland. It’s completely useless, and no pure Wayland system will ever be deployed, period.
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We do, based on the usecases you describe you should look at GNOME application called Boxes for your personal devleoper needs to interact with your VMs. For remoting we have a project called SPICE that among other things allows accessing remote desktops, check out (http://spice-space.org/) for more details. There is also a desktop application called Vinagre which should allow you to access remote Windows clients using RDP.