Ubuntu 22.04 will use LTS Wayland by default with the NVIDIA driver

Ubuntu 22.04LTS OS Just around the corner and one of the most important novelties it is expected to bring compared to the previous LTS is the creation of Wayland by default. Canonical has already made a leap in Ubuntu 21.04.2019 For Radeon, Intel and more recently she decided The same applies to NVIDIA with its own driver.

As our regular readers know, NVIDIA has been one of the biggest obstacles Wayland has faced throughout his career. The green giant, who owns a Long tradition of contempt for standardsthey tried to enforce their own implementation of the protocol with EGLStreams, while developers from Intel, AMD and compositor (Motor, Cowen, Sway, etc.) decided to go with GBM.

NVIDIA’s non-compliance threatened to introduce more fragmentation into the Linux graphics stack, resulting in one of the largest tech wars in system history. In the past two years, the pressure on NVIDIA has increased a bit because AMD has been doing better and better Released more technologiesIntel announced the return to the market Custom graphics And small movements like Xorg’s hasty demiseplus other facts that could fit perfectly into this list.

After years of anger, the problem seems to have occurred At least a relatively happy ending. Coming back to what really matters to us in this entry, Canonical has made the decision that a session Wayland defaults to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS starting with NVIDIA 510 series drivers.. This means that those running an older graphics card not supported by the latest driver will still use Xorg unless they decide to use Nouveau, the free driver that lives on a bit more than you get from the green company.

This move by Canonical could be a pressure on NVIDIA to standardize its work, especially considering that Ubuntu is by far the most widely used Linux distribution. If Canonical does not hold back, then Ubuntu 22.04 LTS should be the ultimate promoter of Wayland, which will finally become popular among users.

For those of you clueless, Ubuntu uses GNOME as a desktop environment, so Wayland thrives on its support. GNOME has the most mature implementation of the protocol available for a desktop environment (if we count window managers, Sway is probably the most mature), so Canonical, if it doesn’t back down at the last minute, has a chance to take care of itself and contribute more actively to years of work to date. Still need perfect.

Although Wayland has a large number of detractors, to date it is the only powerful way for Linux to get a modern graphics stack, more effectivewhich patches unresolvable vulnerabilities in Xorg and, above all, opens the door to supporting technologies and contexts that could become prevalent in the coming years, such as Virtual Reality and the HDR.