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."

Comments

Re:X11 - The X Windowing System

[gblues]

Good god, who the hell modded you insightful.

Yeah, X separates application from display. Big fucking deal. The problem inherent with that is that there is no benefit to separating the application from the display. What X11 does is blit the entire damn window over the network. Fine on a local machine (= unlimited bandwidth), OK on a LAN, but murder over the Internet. You might as well be trying to stream an uncompressed movie.

X11 flat out got it wrong. Separating the application from the display is worse than useless. Separating the application from the UI is what should have happened, because then your computing environment can have some consistency while still having the ability to run things across a network. That's the entire reason that browser-based applications have taken off over the past decade, particularly AJAX powered stuff. Instead, what we get are 20 million X applications that each have their own widgets, UI conventions, and configuration files because nobody in the X11 design sessions stopped to think that users might want the Print command to be in the same place and use the same keystroke in every application, or that users might want their menus to be rendered in a TrueType font (and to be able to change that font without editing 20 million configuration files).

HTML+AJAX is doing now what X11 should've been doing 20 years ago. I don't know enough about Citrix or WTS to know how thin their client is, but I'm betting it's a lot thinner than X11.

Re:Thank you!

[DerWulf]

This answer was predictable ... MY wireless works fine, I'VE got a year uptime, NO computer EVER crashed while I was around. Don't you see that you can't refute a general statement with an anecdote?