When I first saw that Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, was dumping the X Window System, which is the networking windowing system that’s the foundation of almost all Unix and Linux graphical desktop, for Wayland, an OpenGL-based display management system, I wondered if other Linux distributors would follow. After all, everyone in Linux graphics circles had one or more beefs with X-too complicated, too slow, too filled with archaic junk and so on. On the other hand, everyone in Unix circles had also been using X since the late 80s, long before Linus Torvalds started work on Linux. Could people really give up X that quickly? You betcha! Fedora, Red Hat’s community distribution, has also decided to start to move to Wayland too.
After the recent Linux Plumbers Conference, a gathering of core Linux developers, Fedora’s “graphics cabal,” Adam Jackson, Kevin Martin, and Dave Airlie decided that while Wayland wasn’t ready yet, with work, Fedora could, and should, use Wayland in place of X for its graphics stack.