Various new features have been presented that will be included in the next versions of Lubuntu, some of which have been mentioned here on the blog. And this time the developer in charge of the development of Lubuntu has released new news.
simon quigle (the Lubuntu developer) announced important news regarding future Lubuntu releases, as it has announced that the graphical server X.org will be replaced by Wayland.
For those readers who do not know Lubuntu I can tell you that this is a GNU / Linux system which is based on Ubuntu, but with the difference that instead of using the desktop environment that Ubuntu uses, Lubuntu makes use of the environment of LXDE desktop.
The development of Lubuntu aims to create an operating system that minimizes the resources required for its operation on a computer. So it is not surprising that his own motto is: "light, fast, easier"
Lubuntu wants to replace X.org with Wayland
Based on Ubuntu currently Lubuntu uses the graphical server X.org by default. It is clear that nobody and nothing prevents you from making the changes that they consider necessary to continue with your goal of having a system that minimizes resources.
As you know, from the moment it was launched 8 years ago, Lubuntu has always been a flavor of Ubuntu dedicated to old computers.
Recently, however, he even made it known that this flavor of Ubuntu abandoned development to 32-bit architecture, The developers have decided to change their approach and want to become a modern Lubuntu distribution.
So opting for Wayland and LXQt seems to confirm this choice.
Before thiso have announced that future versions of Lubuntu will have a graphical server change, replacing X.org with the Wayland graphical server.
This situation will not change suddenly so Lubuntu plans to make this migration to Wayland until its version of 20.10, so this will be happening in the month of October 2020.
Also like most readers who are Ubuntu users, you will know that Canonical has already tried to change the X.org server to Wayland as the default graphics server in Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark.
Although this change cost him a lot of criticism and several compatibility problems, he had to go back to X.Org with the current Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver version for reasons related to system stability.
This choice by Quigley might suggest that the same decision could soon be taken from Canonical for Ubuntu, even for the LTS versions.
At the moment this change will take a little more than two years, so you have enough time to start building a system that is stable with this graphical server.
Among what the developer said about it, I reflect it in three simple questions with their answers:
Q: Why are you switching to Wayland?
A: The X application is old and will not be updated to address the way Linux desktop is used today. Window managers are an afterthought, and a lot of things don't apply correctly. Wayland is a modern version of the Linux system screen.
Q: What about people with NVIDIA graphics cards?
A: More details to solve, but the plan is to get this job with those graphics cards at that time.
Q: I thought Mir was dropped when the Ubuntu Touch platform was dropped?
A: Mir survived, and still has a team of Canonical employees working on him.
As I have mentioned on previous occasions, Wayland has a great future and in a matter of time it can become the replacement for the X.org graphical server in most Linux distributions.
Canonical wanted to venture to make this change, but it did not turn out as they planned, since making a change of this type is not something that can be established in such a short period of 6 months.
In addition to this, video cards come into play which are another mess with what Canonical to do when making this change.
If more, as has been said, two years is a good time to plan and propose solutions to the main problems that we currently have with Wayland.