Apologies to any of you that may be afflicted by my cross-posting ...

I have (quite accidentally) come across the news that Ubuntu seek to implement a graphics system called "Wayland" as a replacement for X-Windows, on grounds like

"We don't believe X is set up to deliver the user experience we want, with super-smooth graphics and effects," Shuttleworth explained.

There is an article in PCWorld about it:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/210018/ ubuntu_will_adopt_wayland_graphics_system.html

(Equivalently: http://tinyurl.com/3ygzme3 )

and, it seems from other sources, Fedora plan to do the same (though I'm not seeing any such signs on the Debian front).

Wayland may be more glitzy (for all I know) and more likely to pull in users who currently prefer the Mac experience and the like. But I am seriously perturbed by the following (in the above article):

"Among the X11 capabilities not included in Wayland is network transparency."

The Joy of X has been that one can run different programs on different machines all the while sitting at the one machine, with X happily transmitting anything X-ish over the network to be happily displayed by the X-server on one's own machine. Would this cease?

And, in the case of the other machines which may be old and running only X, even if Wayland can offer "network transparency" could it provide a display server on the Wayland machine for X applications running on other machines (and not just in Linux -- other machines running "real" Unix with X can communicate just as well)?

If not, then Linux as we know it could cease to exist! Transparent networking with X is one of the joys of Linux/Unix.

Any views/news? Ted.

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