Comment 50 for bug 954352

Sebastien: Because all the chicken and egg problems with wayland are annoying, and this is a step we can take in the right direction. And it's a huge part of the usability of wayland - which is expected to be used by clients primarily through GTK+ and Qt. And people were testing it and saying it didn't break things three months ago.

You mention a history of enabling this backend causing problems. I acknowledge there were a couple major regressions, but they were fixed before I even created the precise ppa. By defaulting to X over Wayland (as suggested / written by krh), and disabling the wayland clipboard when the X backend was also built. So yes, regressions are possible, but do not seem to have occurred for some time.

I was kind of frothing at the suggestion that ubuntu shouldn't enable this just because other distros haven't, until I realized the head gtk maintainer, Matthias Clasen, is employed by Red Hat, so that makes a little sense. Although I don't think they have wayland 0.95 packaged yet, so it's... more steps for them to achieve. And everybody standing around waiting for somebody else to do something is annoying.

It's unfortunate that we're past feature freeze. But we weren't five months ago when I opened this bug, and we weren't three months ago when I created the precise ppa and people said it didn't break things. And unlike last release, this isn't an LTS release. And we still have two beta releases to go before final.

Thanks for asking :)