Wayland The Wait Is Over

The next-gen display protocol is ready for primetime! There, we said it send all your arguments to Jonni Bidwell…

- Jonni Bidwell

The trusty X Windows display  server has been around since the  UNIXes of the ’80s. It came to  Linux in the form of X386 (later XFree86) in the ’90s, and the bona fide open  source X.org fork took over in 2004. It’s been  pushing pixels around Linux users’ screens  ever since.

You no longer need to risk blowing up  your monitor with manually specified display  timings; in fact, you probably don’t need to  configure it at all. It’s been extended beyond  recognition to cope with new hardware and  programming: XAA, GLX, Glamor, UXA and  a slew of other obscure codenames and  acronyms ensure that all your windows move  around smoothly. Plus a bunch of its low-level functionality has been moved into the  kernel, in the form of KMS.