LWN.net: Daniel Stone considers the future of the Linux desktop in the light of Ubuntu’s return to GNOME. “The world in 2017, however, is a very different place. KMS provides us truly device-independent display control, Vulkan and EGL provide us GPU acceleration independent of window system, xkbcommon provides shared keyboard mechanics, and logind lets us do all these things without ever being root. GBM allocates our buffers, and the universal allocator, borne out of discussions with the whole community including NVIDIA, will soon join the family. Mir leans heavily on all these technologies, so the change is a bit less seismic than you might think.”