How do I feel about Unity and Wayland in Ubuntu?

There's been a lot of garment-rending of late about Ubuntu's decision to steer away from GNOME 3 and GNOME-shell and instead pursue it's own desktop environment (or is it a window manager?) in the form of Unity, as well as its intent to drop or marginalize Xorg in favor of Wayland for its graphical display.

In my view, community considerations aside, the moves are risky and bold, and they could either set Ubuntu apart as a technological leader, or they could scuttle the distribution entirely as an inefficient platform that nobody wants to use.

Yep. Risky.

I'm not sure how I'll like an interface meant for mobile clients, and while I do like GNOME 2 and am unsure about the performance penalty of GNOME 3/GNOME-shell and/or Unity, I'll certainly take a look at what Ubuntu's doing with its next couple of releases.

These days I'm pretty much staying in the Xfce world as far as desktops go. While Xfce isn't the fastest desktop out there, it's far from the slowest, and more importantly offers a great deal of functionality. Many complain that the Xfce environments in Fedora and Ubuntu are laden with GNOME bits. Truthfully I'm OK with that. I really appreciate having NetworkManager, for one thing. I even have Totem installed on this Xfce system. It does take more resources than Xfce's excellent Parole Media Player, but I like having a choice of players.

It's funny. In Debian I like to run GNOME. In Fedora it's Xfce. In OpenBSD these days I've been rolling in GNOME. In Ubuntu I volley between Xfce and GNOME.

All the complaining about Ubuntu not contributing enough to GNOME and now basically creating their own code from scratch doesn't bother me all that much. I understand that Ubuntu wants to move faster than GNOME and have control over the development. They could end up producing something really great (or awful).

We already have KDE in addition to GNOME. And Xfce, LXDE, etc., are there too. Another desktop environment/window manager won't cause the world to cease spinning on its axis.

And instead of worrying about Ubuntu being more different from other GNOME-based distributions than it already is, think of this as an opportunity for those distributions (Fedora and Debian among them) to truly offer something different (and potentially better) than Ubuntu.

Update: I've since learned that Fedora is also contemplating a move to Wayland for its display. I don't know what the implications of this change are for existing (or random) hardware, but I have a feeling there will be a significant number of distributions that chose to stick with regular X that the collective we won't be left out in the cold.