I clicked through three levels of reference links and I still have no idea what Xwayland is, except that it is some kind of refactoring of the Linux graphics stack. Could someone please explain why people seem so excited about it?

The larger idea this fits into is getting rid of X11 all together. The inevitable replacement is Wayland.* One of the challenges of such a switch will that once you start using wayland, you'll have some older applications that cant talk to wayland, you'd have to start an X server to run that old application.

If you have a wayland session on your computer, you don't want to hit ctrl-alt-8 to switch over to an X session running that single application, and then switch back and forth to wayland to use every other program. It would be nice if there was a X server that worked as a wayland client and could put the X-only application on your wayland desktop. That's Xwayland.

* For a better explanation on ditching X, and what Wayland is: see this talk from one of the X dudes working on Wayland http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

Also, if you've ever run an X11 application inside Mac OS X, you've used something similar: XQuartz.

XQuartz is for running X11 applications inside Quartz (Mac OS X's window server/compositor), XWayland is for running X11 applications inside a window server/compositor that uses the Wayland protocol.

It's the component that makes Wayland backwards-compatible with traditional X11, allowing traditional X11 apps to run under Wayland.

It's an Xserver that runs inside Wayland. Wayland is a new graphics server (made for Linux), that replaces X. But most applications will still need X. So you run a small X server inside Wayland so you can still use those applications.

(N.B graphics are run as a server in Linux, you send requests to the server and it places you graphics on the screen (if applicable))

from my limited understanding, it's supposed to replace the X display server which is bloated and not lean. One potential I see is it will be easier and more efficient to run applications in headless mode. I'd like to know more about Wayland.

I'm shocked at how fast Wayland is coming together. It's inspiring to watch.

Could it be that competition is the mother of productivity?

It's more that we have people working on it at several companies full-time now, including me.

Competition with what? Windows, OS X? Xorg?

Edit: Can't seem to reply to child, but Mir isn't really a credible competitor (See: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2014/03/more-on-why-display-serve... . Unfortunately Mir seems to be mostly NIH; everyone else is cooperating on Wayland.)

Canonicals Mir

I guess this is sarcasm. Wayland started in 2008.,yup, its like 6 years old and we still don't have it adopted enough for general use.

So, how many man hours should it take to design and implement a new display server architecture? I've been watching it's development without a clue how it's going because it's a big undertaking in a field I hardly understand, I don't know how many people are on the project or how much time they're putting in. If you could clear those up for me, that'd be cool.

Really, from 2008-2012, it's mostly been a one-man toy project. It's only since mid-2012 or so that we've had many different people working on it.

Until early 2014, I along with my team at Red Hat were busy building RHEL7. RHEL7 development has slowed down now, and full-time Wayland development has started.

The thing is, Wayland is a simplified display server that basically pushes all the hard problems onto others. So for instance there's no rendering code (that's handled via existing projects like Mesa and Cairo), no graphics driver abstraction layer (new graphics drivers are expected to fork Wayland), no seperation between window manager and display server (fork Wayland to change anything!), the input implementation is largely copied from X, network transparency and remoting are Some Else's Problem and require co-operation from app developers...