Presenter(s): Daniel Stone
URL: http://lca2013.linux.org.au/schedule/30256/view_talk

(Or, 'Why Everything You've Read in LWN and Phoronix Comments is Untrue'.)

Wayland is possibly the most impressive free software project to date in terms of the amount of controversy generated to the number of people who've actually ever used it.

The X Window System has served UNIX and its derivatives admirably for longer than the presenter has been alive.  Born in the age of monochrome displays, X's extensibility has allowed it to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.  But this extensibility has come at a cost: the average X server now has at least two wholly unused rendering models, four input stacks, four display management extensions, et al.  Not only that, but the internal design and implementation of the X server (which could generously be described as 'awful') is a serious hinderance to achieving anything.

One thing as constant as X's dominance is new rival window systems which aim to…