Slashdot Mirror
Wayland, a New X Server For Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article out on Wayland: A New X Server For Linux. One of Red Hat's engineers has started writing a new X11 server around today's needs and to eliminate the cruft that has been in this critical piece of free software for more than a decade. This new server is called Wayland and it is designed with newer hardware features like kernel mode-setting and a kernel memory manager for graphics. Wayland is also dramatically simpler to target for in development. A compositing manager is embedded into the Wayland server and ensures 'every frame is perfect' according to the project's leader."
X does not need and should not be allowed to die. Sadly X11 is probably one of the coolest pieces of misunderstood software on the planet. It is a bit dated and it does need a code cleanup/refactor, but because of proper design, that can happen without breaking the system.
And X has probably given unix wankers the most wet dreams of any software project on the planet.
Give me a break. Atoms stay around in memory forever, by design. There's no audio. It has the overhead of packing/unpacking data into structs. You can use shared memory, but it's no panacea. Lots of complicated stuff like ICCCM and Visuals and xauth. Ad hoc things like cut and paste via shared secrets. Can't disconnect/reconnect the same client. Lots of unused (even at the time) primitives like jaggy lines and circles designed for 1-bit displays. The list goes on and on. Seriously I could fill pages of just mentions of the problems, assuming you to know the details.
So what does X get right? You can run a program over the network. That's it. Awesome... except that almost nobody does this, and VNC basically solves that problem. Certainly if anybody cared to, VNC-alike could easily send individual windows instead of the whole screen, like they do with vmware and parallels. But nobody cares to do that because in reality it's not that big a deal.