A Wayland Of A Time

Jonni Bidwell meets  Daniel Stone to find  out what’s hot in the  crazy world of Linux  graphics right now.

- Jonni Bidwell

Collabora’s Daniel Stone has spent nearly two decades hacking on the Linux graphics stack. A term that would send lesser men mad. But not Daniel. We caught up with the guru of pixel pushing in hip and tech-culture-steeped Shoreditch to talk Wayland, Atomic Modesetting and virtual reality. And to reminisce about sunny Melbourne.

Linux format: So they tell me you’ve been working on the Linux graphics stack for quite some time?

Daniel Stone: Yeah, I think I’ve been doing that for about 16 or 17 years now. I started out doing packages for Debian, and ended up at one of the colleges at Melbourne Uni. They needed a newer version of XFree86, so they asked me to arrange it. “How hard can this possibly be?”, I thought, and I just sort of got sucked in from there.

LXF: Where did your initial Linux interest come from?

DS: Misspent youth, really. I don’t know exactly. My dad was really interested in computers, and I was using KDE quite early on. It would’ve been around 2001 – I started with Slackware, but I distinctly remember staying up one night trying to get X to run. Then I moved to Red Hat and was amazed at how much easier it was.

LXF: I had the pleasure of meeting Juan and Berto from Igalia last year, and their story was quite inspiring. A few guys just out of uni, setting up a sort of one-stop open source shop in their hometown, and Igalia is now among the most prolific contributors to FOSS. How does Collabora’s story compare, and am I even pronouncing that right?