This morning, I heard that Ubuntu was going to transition from Xorg to Wayland, and I immediately wondered what was going to happen to some of the features I loved in X11. I popped into their IRC channel, and asked. Here's a transcript. (Slightly redacted to remove other ambient conversation.)

14:11 -!- Irssi: #wayland: Total of 74 nicks [0 ops, 0 halfops, 0 voices, 74 normal]
14:11 -!- Channel #wayland created Mon Jan 25 17:35:42 2010
14:11 -!- Irssi: Join to #wayland was synced in 0 secs

14:11 < oliver602> How often do people make use of network transperency in X?

14:11 < shortcircuit> * I DO *
14:12 < shortcircuit> That's the big reason I came in...to ask if Wayland was going to support that...
14:12 < shortcircuit> In fact, I'm in the process of setting up an app server, since I've got a box with more beef than I can otherwise use.

14:13 < MatthiasF> shortcircuit: yes but it will only support bitmap protocols

14:14 < shortcircuit> MatthiasF: Will it at least support intelligent compression (i.e. limited update regions)?
14:16 < shortcircuit> Also, one of the things I love about X's network transparency is the seamless integration of remote apps into the local X server, resizable and all. RDP and VNC don't do that. Will Wayland?

14:17 < MatthiasF> shortcircuit: yes and yes, the protocol can do it. but network transparency is the last priority

14:19 < shortcircuit> MatthiasF: Cool. At least it's on the list. Will it be supported before the X11 shim is dropped?

14:20 < giselher> shortcircuit: nobody knows :)

14:21 < MatthiasF> shortcircuit: probably

14:24 < shortcircuit> MatthiasF: One last question; will Wayland expose GPGPU processing capabilities (such as available through OpenCL)? How will such computation libraries coexist in the Wayland architecture?

14:25 < MatthiasF> shortcircuit: Wayland doesn't expose any rendering API, that's what makes it simpler

14:26 < shortcircuit> MatthiasF: Point, but processing libraries that make use of the GPU will compete with Wayland's rendering for resources. Do you have any thoughts or plans for managing or coping with that?

14:26 < MatthiasF> shortcircuit: that's handled by drm not wayland

14:27 < shortcircuit> Ah, ok. Thanks. :)