X- Window System is the core graphic-framework for Unix/Linux desktops. Sadly, it does not works very well with low-power mini-pc's like Raspberry Pi and therefore alternatives like Wayland are being developed. MicroXwin is a kernel-based X Windows implementation, which claims to be the smallest and fastest X implementation promising a faster, stable and has low-latency GUI on mini-pc's with the added advantage of being a unified Linux distribution that can run Android and Debian/Ubuntu applications simultaneously. Both Android and Debian apps run at native speeds and unlike other hacks Debian apps don't depend on Android and has full compatibility with all Android applications.

This is looking to be a great solution to the lack of proper graphic-driver problem on Debian ARM, which prevents proper YouTube and HD video playback on these devices where Android will act as the solution under the unified distribution. VolksPC, the company behind MicroXwin have also shared two videos - one showing Debian-Android duality, and the other showing upto 66% faster desktop performance on Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi is not designed to run heavy KDE or Gnome based Dekstop interfaces and users are looking forward to a more responsive and modern desktop then current default LXDE shell. Wayland Weston is the answer with it's minimal and fast compositor which is suitable for many embedded and mobile use cases like RPi.

Maynard a new desktop environment designed for the Raspberry Pi utilizes Wayland and the power of Hardware Video Scaler (HVS) inside the BCM2835 chip of Raspberry Pi's hardware to offer a much smoother, yet modern looking working environment on limited system resources. The future default Desktop environment for Raspberry Pi is far for complete, but has started to take a nice shape destined to be a fully-functional, light and pretty shell. Do watch the video demonstration shared below and follow the simple installation instructions to try it yourself.

Many Linux distributions including the official Debian based Rasbian distro for Raspberry Pi makes uses of X11 or XServer windowing software to render the user interface, the problem is X11 is not optimized to use the graphics core of RasPi efficiently resulting in degraded lagged window composition. The Raspberry Pi core team has now decided to bypass X11 completely and move over to the open-source Wayland composition protocol.

The overall results are really exciting, while still in development the team prepared a video demonstration comparing the two and results are really promising. The video comparison and links to details including how to install the technology preview on Raspbian are shared below (click Read more).