“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.“We’re confident we’ll be able to retain the ability to run X
applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition
that needs to reset the world of desktop free software. Nor is it a
transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same
reason we’ll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite
also believing that Unity, with all it’s GL dependencies, is the
best interface for the desktop. We’ll help GNOME and KDE with the
transition, there’s no reason for them not to be there on day one
either.“Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something*
in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first
images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be
proven conservative on that 🙂 but I suspect it’s more likely to
err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move
the ecosystem.”