14 DAY TRIAL // A Red Hat developer has explained why asking the question "Is Wayland ready?" is wrong and why everyone else needs to be ready for Wayland.
We often see this question being asked pretty much everywhere, and everyone wants to know if Wayland is finally ready to be shipped as default. It seems that the community is asking the wrong question since Wayland is prepared and has been so for a very long time. The other ones are not ready for Wayland.
Wayland is supposed to replace the old X protocol used right now in most of the Linux distributions. Each time a new version of GNOME gets into production, we see that they are finally ready to ship with Wayland as default, but when the stable version actually arrives, Wayland is moved to second place. You might think that it's not ready yet, but you would be wrong.
Wayland is stable, everyone else needs to catch up
Developer Peter Hutterer has published an incredibly illuminating blog post that sheds some light on what's happening with Wayland and the progress we should see in the future.
"The protocol is stable and has been for a while. But not every compositor and/or toolkit/application speak Wayland yet, so it may not be sufficient for your use-case. So rather than asking 'Is Wayland ready yet,' you should be asking: 'Can I run GNOME / KDE / Enlightenment / etc. under Wayland?' That is the right question to ask," explains Peter.
He's also quite aware of the fact that Wayland is still a young protocol and that it's still missing quite a few things. The support for Wayland is extended all the time, and people are constantly working on it, but the rest of the projects also need to meet them halfway. Wayland is stable, but the other side of the equation needs to make the rest of the effort.