First Apple decides to discontinue their Xserve lineup and now Ubuntu is planning to ditch their X server too.
Confused?
X is the underlying display server in the Ubuntu Linux distro. In an announcement today by Mark Shuttleworth, in the future Ubuntu will be ditching X.org and moving to Wayland display server.
The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system. We’d like to embrace Wayland early, as much of the work we’re doing on uTouch and other input systems will be relevant for Wayland and it’s an area we can make a useful contribution to the project.
Ubuntu is setting out to change the look and feel (and performance) of Linux. The upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 will ditch the GNOME interface for their new Unity styling, but there is no specific timeline for the departure of X.org in Ubuntu. Due to the integration of X into nearly all of Linux it’s possible it could take years to rip it all out in favor of Wayland.
Also, Wayland is still an extremely immature codebase compared to X.org, which is used in nearly every Linux distribution and was first released in 2004 (and was forked from XFree86 which was released in 1991.) In contrast Wayland hasn’t been used in any major Linux distro yet.
via Digitzor