Ubuntu Dumps X For Unity On Wayland

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will move away from the traditional X.org display environment to Wayland — a more modern alternative. The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system. Shuttleworth said, 'We're confident we’ll be able to retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition that needs to reset the world of desktop free software. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we'll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all its GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop. We'll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there's no reason for them not to be there on day one either.'"

Comments

No standards at all

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF

> The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.

I'm getting sick of this crap "journalism". if you want to make a comment, add a comment. Don't add your opinion to the summary. Just report the facts. If you really have to, blog about your opinion and add a link to that blog, stating that it's your opinion.

Re:No standards at all

[jhigh]

Since when is /. journalism??!

Re:No standards at all

[nixkuroi]

This article reads less like a news story than an emotional, personal rant by someone who's puckering with contempt because he got his feelings hurt.

Tech companies make crappy decisions all the time. Ubuntu probably thought it would have more time to become the king of the desktop before realizing that soon the desktop would be irrelevant and that *nix alternatives had already beaten it to the punch for being the kings of mobile.

At this point, he should probably start thinking further down the road to gesture and voice computing. My kinect tells me that it's almost time to stop touching devices at all, and I believe it.

Re:No standards at all

[Waffle Iron]

I'm getting sick of this crap "journalism". if you want to make a comment, add a comment. Don't add your opinion to the summary. Just report the facts. If you really have to, blog about your opinion and add a link to that blog, stating that it's your opinion.

You must be new here. The summary of an article is nearly always the *opinion* of whoever submitted it. The "news" part is in the original source to which the link(s) in the summary point (assuming the original source isn't itself just an opinion or troll). The summary IS the "blog" part, and it acts as the root of the entire discussion thread. That's the way it has always worked on this site, and it's not very hard to figure out.

Re:No standards at all

[TheCRAIGGERS]

A summary should be as factual as possible. A cut and paste job from the article, aka, an excerpt, is just fine. It's just like the 'breaks' that many blogs use, and just like the 'Continued on page A3' that newspapers have used for decades- you give a summary of the story up front, and if the reader feels like they would benefit from reading the rest, they do so.

This is opposed to what you describe, which is in my opinion bad journalism. Taken to the extreme it's like seeing a summary in a newspaper that reads 'FREE BOOBIES, continued on A4' and then turning to find an article totally unrelated.

Re:No standards at all

[DNS-and-BIND]

Dude. Have you been alive for the past 10 years? Sneaking a biased opinion into an otherwise factual story is a technique that's gotten a TON of use. Not much incentive to be a journalist otherwise, fact-based reporting is what those hick writers in flyover country do and it certainly won't win you any industry awards.

Re:No standards at all

[Java Pimp]

That opinion WAS in TFA... if you had read it...

Re:No standards at all

[Tharsman]

Although I generally agree with this feeling, if you read TFA, you would find this quote:

There’s now little reason for these GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.

So as you can see, it's not something the summary writter made up, he just pasted something that was already in TFA, with just one word changed by a short phrace to better fit the short summary context: "There's" with "The move means there is"

If you want to insult the article itself, go for it, but at least in this one case, your insult of the summary is horrendously out of place.

Re:No standards at all

[jemtallon]

From the article: "There’s now little reason for these GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system."

So... slashdot did a good job?

Re:No standards at all

[Hooya]

> it's almost time to stop touching devices at all

I've been touching devices for quite a while and I am going blind.

Seriously. I'm supposed to pick up my prescription glasses today.. for reading on the computer monitor.

So quit touching your device. You'll go blind.

Re:No standards at all

[Digicrat]

Actually, that is an excerpt from TFA. It's still an inflammatory opinion to be in a news article, but in this case the fault is the original article and not the /. summary (hmm, is that a first?).

Re:No standards at all

[chrb]

Indeed. The headline is alarmist - "Ubuntu Dumps X For Unity On Wayland" makes it sound like they just made a huge change without consulting anyone, but Shuttleworth does say they have consulted others, and he predicts that it will take a year to get the first images out, and 4 years or more to shift applications onto Wayland. Shuttleworth is talking about a long-term direction, and it doesn't seem to be a rash decision - Intel and Nokia both appear to be backing Wayland for mobile devices.

Something like this was bound to happen after Google decided not to use X for Android. The Linux world would benefit greatly from a fast and lightweight display server that has a common codebase for mobile devices and desktops, and can be used as a backend for Android, Meego, KDE and Gnome.

Re:No standards at all

[jgagnon]

I read the original post as an opinionated piece about two opinionated articles, not someone trying to be a journalist and failing.

I haven't been reading Slashdot as long as many of you, but I can say I've VERY rarely read a summary here that I would remotely consider "professional journalism". So I'm confused as to why so many readers apparently expect something different than what they consistently get?

A summary on Slashdot is like a redneck amicus brief so why try to put it at some higher-level standard that it can never achieve?

Re:No standards at all

[Narishma]

Not to mention that the title is incorrect. They are not replacing X with Unity but with Wayland. Unity is just another desktop like Gnome and KDE.

Re:No standards at all

[idontgno]

If he had read TFA, this wouldn't have been Slashdot. It may in fact have been SPARTA!

Re:No standards at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope they have a good time reinventing all the network transparency and other features

They won't. Wayland is intimately tied to the Linux DRI model and makes no attempt at cross-platform compatibility or other X features.

The idea behind Wayland, for as far as I have understood, is to offer a framebuffer-style (OpenGL) surface for applications to draw on. That's it. There are no intermediate layers, and no abstraction: the application (toolkit) must have an OpenGL backend or it won't work. I believe clutter and Cairo already have an OpenGL backend, not sure about GTK/Qt.

Backwards compatibility is achieved by (optionally) running X(server) as a sub-process of Wayland. I'm actually quite positive about this development: it's not an X replacement, but an encapsulation. It will be interesting to see how it develops. Personally, I think this will remain limited to a handful of applications (WM, decorator, configuration), at least that's how I'd like it to be. As long as there's no inherent slowdown for X apps, I fail to see the downside.

Re:No standards at all

[gknoy]

The trouble is, they both believe fundamentally different things about what it means to have a Good UI.

If my idea of a good dessert is brownies, and yours is lemon meringue pie, it's really hard to combine the two (or compromise) and yeild something that doesn't suck. I'll look at pies you make and say, "This dessert lacks sufficient chewiness" or "This crust makes a fundamentally problematic dessert interface", and you'll look at my brownie-like concoctions and want more crust, less chocolate, more lemon (!?), and some creamy bits. Sometimes, two very different and competing ideas work well by servicing different niches.

(Though, perhaps Schadenfreude pie would be a good compromise between pie and brownies, so my example may be flawed.)

Re:No standards at all

[Lumpy]

I'm not paralyzed by choice. I like choice.

Problem is currently my choices are half done betaware, and half done betaware.. NOTHING is a complete solution... They both focus on stupid shineys instead of fixing major problems that have existed for a very long time.

Re:No standards at all

[spitzak]

GTK is using Cairo.

Ok great for beginners

[betterunixthanunix]

...but I still know a LOT of people who forward X over SSH, and there are still a lot of professors who are advising their students (at least in the engineering schools I have seen) to do the same. I guess this is one of those times that just saying, "I use Linux!" will not convey what people think.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[sd.fhasldff]

Wayland is a display server, like X. Why wouldn't it be possible to forward Wayland over SSH?

Re:Ok great for beginners

[AaxelB]

Fortunately, X is not Linux, and Linux is not X, which might help clear up some of your confusion. When someone says "I use Linux!", it means exactly that, and you can't really assume a priori what else they've got. Of course, most Ubuntu users will say "I use Ubuntu!", which should make things easier.

Personally, I rarely do anything that really depends on X being X, so my reaction is essentially "huh, I wonder how that'll work out."

Re:Ok great for beginners

[betterunixthanunix]

Because not all the applications people want to forward are written for Wayland; one that comes to mind is a VLSI tool from Cadence, which is proprietary software that is often encountered in EE curricula (for VLSI courses and whatnot), which I doubt will be updated to Wayland any time soon. People have come to rely on an X server, specifically, being available to them.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Linux is not Unix

2. X is neither part of Unix nor required for it.

Anything else you'd like to add to this discussion?

Re:Ok great for beginners

[Culture20]

I still know a LOT of people who forward X over SSH

I don't think that's relevant. They'll still be able to use encrypted VNC, or some other solution of their choice.

Forwarding an X session (ie running Firefox on the remote machine and having it display on your local X daemon appearing as a local program) is far different from running VNC (using a full desktop environment on the remote machine), even though both can be run via ssh tunnels.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[makomk]

Wayland is a very minimal display server. It requires clients to access the graphics card hardware themselves using the DRM kernel API in order to actually render anything, and you can't do that over a network. Basically, Wayland only works when the display server and its clients are running on the same machine, and that's a deliberate design decision that can't be changed easily.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[jellomizer]

Forwarding X isn't really an ideal way to do things anymore.

VNC/RDP and other protocalls are MUCH faster then using X. The professors would still have students do their code with punch cards if they had their way.

most X applications have gotten so graphically robust that their design isn't optimal anymore. Back in the old days where it was just vector graphics where CPU were fast compared to bandwidth meant a some simple box drawings made a robust X app. Now almost every element today has some sort of bitmapped graphic tied to it. And making it slow for remote use.

It is not saying the X doesn't have any advantages over others... It does however if you weigh the tradeoffs you will find that people are suffering more then they are being helped.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[computational super]

X is a part of any proper Unix.

Proper Unix doesn't have any graphical display capabilities at all.

Now get off my lawn.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[dpilot]

You mean like the fact that I need to use the same Cadence you're talking about as part of my day job, as well as a whole host of other X-based VLSI CAD applications. Every now and then I need to work from home, and X lets me do that. To be sure, sometimes I use VNC, but sometimes I run the X tools native on my home system, too. Different tasks call for different approaches.

Leaving work out of it, sometimes I just like to run some GUI tools on my server, with the display exported back to my desktop. My server doesn't even have an X server installed.

I strongly suspect that the people who pooh-pooh the networking capabilities of X never got used to using them.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[swillden]

People have come to rely on an X server, specifically, being available to them.

I had the same thought, but after looking at the Wayland architecture I'm less concerned. Here's a relevant quote from the Wayland architecture pages:

Wayland is a complete window system in itself, but even so, if we're migrating away from X, it makes sense to have a good backwards compatibility story. With a few changes, the Xorg server can be modified to use wayland input devices for input and forward either the root window or individual top-level windows as wayland surfaces. The server still runs the same 2D driver with the same acceleration code as it does when it runs natively, the main difference is that wayland handles presentation of the windows instead of KMS.

So it sounds like application developers will have a choice of using the Wayland window system directly, or using the X protocol to talk to an X server which uses Wayland to display its output. In practice, of course, no one will do either. Application developers use toolkits like Qt, GTK, wx, etc., so what will probably happen is that the toolkits will choose either the X or the Wayland protocol, perhaps dynamically based on the available options.

I was pretty sure when I went to look at the Wayland stuff that this is a bad idea. After reading about it a bit, though, I'm not so sure. Wayland is designed around the notion of compositor-based display, which is clearly where everything is now or is going soon, while the compositor is a somewhat-klunky add-on to an X server. If Wayland can retain X's network transparency, streamline and simplify the graphics architecture, provide a cleaner and less...bizarre... protocol, and also allow native X apps to continue running without issue and to be gradually ported from the X protocol to the Wayland protocol as it becomes convenient... I think it may be a very good idea indeed.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[RCGodward]

X is absolutely required for Unix.
uniX
See?

Re:Ok great for beginners

[AaxelB]

1. Linux is not Unix
2. X is neither part of Unix nor required for it.

Anything else you'd like to add to this discussion?

Nice troll! You managed to choose a topic that is probably as complex and volatile as Kirk vs. Picard, but yet is not as familiar.

Nah, it's pretty well known and accepted that Linux is not Unix. Linux is certainly and undeniably Unix-like, but it's not Unix.

Not really complex. Not really volatile. Not a troll.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[camperdave]

> You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

No. I just happen to do this for a living.

Ah! A consultant.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[abigor]

Sun shipped with NeWS. NeXT shipped with Display Postscript. SGI shipped with MEX and later 4Sight. I guess none of these were "proper" Unixes in your godlike eyes - someone better alert The Open Group.

Wayland reuses X's drivers. It can also host X with a negligible performance loss.

All in all, this is a great thing for desktop Linux, which needs all the help it can get. With commercial vendors rallying around Qt, which already has good Wayland support, the future looks hopeful.

Are you some kind of junior sysadmin? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[jelle]

It doesn't have to be limited to only local use. It's an api, which means somebody can make an implementation that forwards the api calls into some kind of rpc calls (or work on a higher level with all sorts of roundtrip and bandwidth optimization), allowing networked use. Even the drm api can be implemented as a virtual graphics device with a network backend, but that's probably not even necessary because from the architecture pictures I don't see a reason why the compositor wouldn't be able to support a network environment. It would need a local compositor and a remote compositor that know how to talk to each other (and with each some significant code to 'hide' the network), but it would be transparent to the local application. As long as the wayland protocol allows multiple wayland compositors to operate concurrently on a system (where the client apps run), and if it lets a wayland client choose the compositor to use (with some type of access protection in there), it should be possible to implement transparent networked displaying.

Maybe it will make the networked displaying more complex than a tcp connection from the X client library to the X server, but it's certainly not impossible. The X protocol isn't ideal for all networked use (anymore) either, because it's so sensitive to network latency and it doesn't help in any significant way to be bandwidth efficient, especially with the increasing amount of client-side rendering and 3d stuff that is happening these days (and not all X protocol features work on a remote connection (for example (and afaik): xrandr, dri, etc). Perhaps a good networked remote display protocol that optimizes and compresses all that when/where necessary will work equally as well (with as much complexity) in the wayland framework as it will in the xorg framework.

So perhaps in order to support modern displays and diverse networks, remote display has to get a little more complex than a simple remote X display anyway. I don't wayland is going to make that much different.

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

Re:Ok great for beginners

[swillden]

Forwarding X isn't really an ideal way to do things anymore. VNC/RDP and other protocalls are MUCH faster then using X

Bicycling isn't really an ideal way to do things any more. Automobiles are much faster than bicycles.

Okay, so not a perfect analogy, but you get the point. VNC/RDP can't forward just a remote application, they have to bring the whole desktop. They can't integrate cut and paste as seamlessly as forwarded X. They don't allow your local window manager to choose where things are placed, how they're moved, etc.

There are plenty of cases where VNC/RDP make perfect sense and forwarded X connections do not. There are also plenty of cases where the reverse is true. Different tools for different situations.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[MikeBabcock]

VNC isn't the same and doesn't work just as well at all.

VNC is not a per-application system in any sense.

When I'm sitting at my desktop running the GUI Xen interface off of one server, the Java HP interface from another server, and a remote database app off a third server all on my screen, I'm using X the way it was designed to be used. If I wanted to do the above with VNC, I'd have a bunch of annoying desktops on my screen to flip through, instead of applications. I'd also have to have vncserver installed on those machines, which is a bloated X server running in memory. No need for any of that with X forwarding.

I have lots of headless servers with no GUI interface that I can run GUI apps on remotely using X forwarding and SSH X tunnelling, and have no intention of installing VNC on any of them for no net benefit, and a horrible UI result.

Re:Ok great for beginners

[dpilot]

I know who it's intended for, and I agree. I'm more worried about the unintended consequences - like crowding out some of the things that are great about traditional X - like network transparency.

That's a nifty description - transparency. VNC can let you do the work, but it just isn't transparent, at all.

I understand that Wayland is necessarily local, but I strongly suspect that if you were willing to give up performance - and drop back to something more like X - it could do remote, as well. The big thing is the unified access. I know you don't want to run a first-person shooter over the network. Heck, I don't even want to run VLSI CAD tools over the network - but sometimes I have to, and when you need it, you need it.

If the most popular distribution goes local-only, I fear the coming round of popular never-transparent applications running on it. People talk about "too many distributions", which is mostly a red herring, because there is so much in common. But two non-interoperable display technologies is true balkanization - a truly dangerous split.

gnome developers what?

[Lord Ender]

The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system.

I don't know a single person, not one, who makes his OS choice based on what "gnome developers" recommend. Why was this bit even added to the summary?

Re:gnome developers what?

[Fnord666]

I don't know a single person, not one, who makes his OS choice based on what "gnome developers" recommend. Why was this bit even added to the summary?

Because it was in the article and summaries have become nothing more than cut and paste jobs. There isn't any actual summarizing any more.

woohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

about damn time somebody had the balls to drop X. Oh, but i can't run x over ssh over a 300 baud modem!!!!111!!!!eleven!! Well, you can't drive a ferrari through the outback either, but it get more pussy than a jeep.

Wayland...

[DaPhil]

For anyone else wondering what Wayland is: "Wayland is a lightweight display server for the GNU/Linux desktop. Started by Kristian Høgsberg [...] the software's stated goal is "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker"" (Wikipedia)

Here is the website and the wikipedia entry.

Re:Wayland...

[maugle]

"Interesting", thinks Shuttleworth,
"Will devote resources to the project, hopefully shift to using it in a year, but will focus on maintaining compatibility with X applications", says Shuttleworth on his blog,
"OMG, UBUNTU DUMPS X!!!", reports Slashdot.

Summary's BOGUS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... Guys... Wayland doesn't preclude X11. Think of X11 as a two part system. One's the rendering and compositing layer and the other is the network transport layer that makes it network transparent. Wayland's the driver backend guts. They've shown MULTIPLE X11 desktops being ran on top of Wayland.

This isn't the thing that many make it out to be. SERIOUSLY.

Re:Summary's BOGUS...

[Waffle Iron]

That's good to hear. All I care about is one thing: does "ssh -X" work correctly and transparently out of the box with all included apps. If so, no problem. If not, I'll switch distros.

Re:Summary's BOGUS...

[Patrice]

I guess this is the case for many people: as soon as you have a setup of several computers at home and organised them into a local network (and not just a bunch of individual machines that connect to the Internet independently), you start to rely on network management (not even speaking about enterprise setups). I use daily "ssh -X" to run remote GUI apps on my netbook.

I also happen to maintain my parents' computers (located 25 km away), and once in a while I pop up one of their applications on my screen, to reconfigure it when something's broken or not working as wished, at least when there are no good CLI way of doing it, which is the case with most GUI apps today (it's quite slow over the internet with different providers, but it just works, which is enough for my needs).

Being a long-time Ubuntu user, I'd hate it to have to switch away from it (it takes time to reinstall all those machines - and I can't upgrade them remotely as I'm doing today with Ubuntu), but remotely running GUI apps is a must.

If in two years (or whenever the switch is done), I can log in to any computer running Ubuntu 12.04 or whatever and run any regular app forwarded to my own netbook/laptop transparently, then no problem... otherwise...

I'm OK with Ubuntu switching away from X and all, but I'm wary of the apparent lack of concern for network transparency support for regular apps. But they still have time to understand that their user base does not only consist of single computers connected individually to the internet.

Re:Summary's BOGUS...

[Dr_Barnowl]

I'd suggest it's mostly to do with the move to compositing window managers, which X was not designed for.

The most specifically obvious example - video.

Video is these days presented by slapping a video texture on a window. If the render of the video frames to the texture isn't done simultaneously with the render of the video frames to the screen, you see "tearing", or a line where one frame ends and another frame begins, something you shouldn't see at all.

The same phenomena happens with composited windows, which are also rendered textures ; drag a window around at speed on a poorly configured X / Compiz desktop and you will see the tearing where two frames of the desktop texture are being rendered out of sync with the screen.

Many users now have more than one screen. X cannot render a single desktop to two screens and keep both synced. While it's possible to get one screen synced, it's not always easy, and getting both screens synced seems to be impossible.

Now, this clearly isn't a hardware limitation, because Windows can and does do this right - I have never seen application windows or video tear on the Aero desktop. This is on the same nVidia card, both operating systems running the official nVidia drivers.

This is one of the few things about Linux that annoys me when I compare it to Windows. The other is PulseAudio - but I have workarounds for my PulseAudio problems. It just looks sloppy to have great big tears in your otherwise very pretty composite display, and if you want to enjoy a movie, you are either stuck with using only one of your screens.

A bit sensationalist...

[Scyth3]

They're slowing transitioning away from X to Wayland. They're not straight up "dumping" X. It'll be there for quite a few releases. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/linux-beyond-x-shuttleworth-contemplates-wayland.ars

Re:A bit sensationalist...

[Enderandrew]

We don't allow sensible comments here. You need to change your post to "Shuttleworth kicks Gnome developers square in the nuts".

Breathe Deep...

[gti_guy]

Calm down people. This isn't any different than Mac OS X using Cocoa for the desktop display and still having X11 available to run as another app. And yes (if you've never tried it), X tunneled through ssh works just fine on Mac OS X. It will be the same thing with the next release of Ubuntu. The sky is NOT falling.

Re:Breathe Deep...

[makomk]

Calm down people. This isn't any different than Mac OS X using Cocoa for the desktop display and still having X11 available to run as another app. And yes (if you've never tried it), X tunneled through ssh works just fine on Mac OS X. It will be the same thing with the next release of Ubuntu. The sky is NOT falling.

That's exactly why people are so worried, though. Like on Mac OS X, all the major applications will be non-X11 and will not be able to be tunneled over SSH. We're talking all applications that use GTK+ or KDE for a start, followed by other applications as soon as the manpower is available to port them. Currently on Mac OS X you need to use some horrid remote-desktop hack like VNC that essentially forwards the entire desktop over the network very, very slowly and it looks like Ubuntu is going to end up in the same situation.

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[somersault]

I remember a discussion a year or two ago here on Slashdot how X was badly in need of replacing. Sounds to me like Canonical have the right idea, and the impetus to make it happen.

That's an EXTREMELY bold move...

[starseeker]

There have been other projects over the years that have tried to improve on X (Fresco/Berlin and picogui readily come to mind) but I don't believe any of them have demonstrated results that seriously threatened the revitalized Xorg project.

I hadn't heard of Wayland, but I must admit since Xorg got going I haven't kept a close eye on that level of the graphics stack. Mark's blog post makes it sound like they're willing to ditch network transparency for better graphics effects, which makes me a little leery. Undoubtedly for most users that's the "right" approach, but if they do lose network transparency it's going to make Ubuntu an impossible choice in a lot of business environments where running apps from a server is part of day-to-day business.

Also, the amount of work to port all the requisite software/toolkits to a non-X platform is going to be... impressive. Haiku faces this problem, as do a fair number of older applications when looking at running native on Windows and OSX - it ain't easy. Plus, we're talking an entirely new backend in Wayland, one that's going to require (from the sound of things) rock solid OpenGL support.

Ubuntu has shown they can deliver in the past, and perhaps they can do it now, but I can't help but wonder if they realize the magnitude of what they're undertaking here.

Correction

[Enderandrew]

Ubuntu will still ship X. Unity will run on X. No definitive decisions have been made. Shuttleworth is considering a transition to Wayland, which he estimates will be 4 years down the road. He assumes at that time that KDE and Gnome apps should be able to run natively on Wayland at that time, but you can run a rootless X server alongside Wayland either way.

But it really is more fun to make non-sensical statements, such as suggesting that Gnome and X are intrinsically tied, and that wanting to replace X four years in the future is some massive insult to Gnome.

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[mcrbids]

But you are missing the point. X is a protocol layed out long, long ago. And there are long standing issues with it that become glaring as we move forward. Long known issues such as 3D support.

Are the advantages of the new server enough to outweigh the costs?

Besides, when did Slashdot become a crowd that believes that there should only be one right way? Forks are GOOD for software evolution - it's how new ideas get tried out!

Go Ubuntu for being brave enough to try to tackle the problems of X!

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[MBGMorden]

Actually, I respect this a lot. X11 is an old, OLD and outdated protocol that people have been trying to move past for years. Until now though, people either lacked the resources or the balls to move forward and actually do it though.

Ubuntu has been consistently making great strides because they WILL do stuff like this. I don't necessarily always agree with them (for example, taskbar buttons on the right), but I admire their dedication.

In a lot of ways I see Shuttleworth as a mirror version of Steve Jobs. They both seem to be willing to throw out any ideas on conventional wisdom and what a system "has" to have or do, and do things their own way. Shuttleworth just seems to be using his powers for good. :)

Will I like this? Not sure. Maybe, maybe not. I think though that if they can really get the community to follow them down this road, we'll all benefit.

Like Mac OS X

[Balthisar]

So, it'll be kind of like running X on my Mac OS X machines. A modern display server, with the ability to run a non-root X on top of it.

Wayland can host X

[sd.fhasldff]

Then it's a good thing Wayland can host X. It would require some (reportedly) minor adjustments to X, but it would be transparent to individual applications.

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[tjwhaynes]

My only concern is that last time I looked Wayland wasn't ready for primetime, and the intent with Wayland wasn't to be a full replacement for X for most users.

If Mark Shuttleworth was proposing Wayland for prime-time inclusion in Ubuntu 11.04 or even 11.10, I'd be concerned. But if you actually follow this news story to the original source at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 you would find this:

Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that :-) but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem. Progress on Wayland itself is sufficient for me to be confident that no other initiative could outrun it, especially if we deliver things like Unity and uTouch with it. And also if we make an early public statement in support of the project. Which this is!

So the first likely viewing of this would 11.10 and real integration into the entire stack is more likely in the 14.10/15.04 time frame.

So this is a classic storm in a teacup right now. The reality is "promising project will be supported by major Linux player for future inclusion".

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

OSX, Windows 95, Vista, Windows 7

[goombah99]

apple, Microsoft and Sun all have radically changed their widowing systems on many occasions while maintaining continuity for their developers. It did not mean no work, it just meant that recompiles could produce a functional product in most cases, albeit one that might look like poo and not have any of the new capabilities of the windowing system.

I find it somewhat hard to believe that the original design of X was so perfectly extendible that after decades of use it is not straining its seems.

So a change may be good.

However, i do see a downside. The nice thing about X unlike Windows and Macs main display interface is that it is more easily separated from the desktop. If you want to use a mac or windows system remotely you have to use something like VNC or a remote desktop app. In both cases you are getting the whole desktop not a display window. You can't run multiple instances of it. That's the main thing I like about X.

Re:OSX, Windows 95, Vista, Windows 7

[sarhjinian]

X isn't actually that good at remote desktop, at least not by comparison. You have to install a fairly thick local client, and if you lose connection your apps die.

Holistically speaking, Citrix et al completely eclipsed X in terms of network-retargetable display a long time ago and for those times when you want to run an app remotely but don't want to lose the app if your connection dies (which is pretty much all the time) you end up running X over VNC anyway.

Me, though, I'd like to know if this change will finally allow me to have use a compositing window manager without tearing (you know, like MacOS and Windows have been doing for years now) and without having to restrict myself to an ancient or gutless graphics card.

Re:OSX, Windows 95, Vista, Windows 7

[Cajun Hell]

apple, Microsoft and Sun all have radically changed their widowing systems on many occasions

Sure, they changed certain aspects of the system, but they never strayed from the core design assumption: the husband must die.

Re:OSX, Windows 95, Vista, Windows 7

[Abcd1234]

Holistically speaking, Citrix et al completely eclipsed X in terms of network-retargetable display a long time ago and for those times when you want to run an app remotely but don't want to lose the app if your connection dies (which is pretty much all the time) you end up running X over VNC anyway.

Well, smart people run X over NX, which provides wicked performance far eclipsing VNC, integrated encryption (it uses SSH, but it's part of the standard tool), detachable sessions, etc, etc. And that performance is specifically a consequence of NX proxying the X protocol. You'd never be able to achieve that kind of performance using a simple framebuffer-based remote display technology.

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[computational super]

I'm a little shocked at all the negativity. Have you people used X? If Ubuntu can drive a replacement, let them drive a replacement!

Please retain network transparency

[Urban Garlic]

I am all in favor of a new and better graphical system, but for the love of God, PLEASE keep network transparency. I want to forward my graphical session to other hosts, and have windows from remote systems show up on (and be managed by) my local display. This is *essential* for some sysadmin tasks I have to do, on a remote system that *has* *no* *graphical* *console*, but for which some of the tools *require* a GUI. At the moment, the saving grace of this system is system is that I can ssh in, forward my X connection, and run GUI software remotely.

On a related note, I wish to inform the community at large and Ubuntu in particular that not everyone is using a personally-administered workstation with a local file system. Some of us NFS-mount our home directories from a central server, and some of us install software on application servers which are also NFS-mounted. Please take care that "new improved" installers and desktop systems do not break in this environment.

Thank you.

The trademark owner defines it

[tepples]

OSX isn't Unix. "UNIX certified" is not UNIX.

UNIX is a registered trademark, and under United States law, the owner of the trademark gets the first crack at establishing a definition. How were you defining UNIX? Derivative work of the Bell Labs source code?

Re:And thus the curse of Open Source manifests its

[russotto]

And thus the curse of Open Source manifests itself - Develop something to to the virge of usability and robustness...then BAM! "Fuggit" let's start again in a new direction and it will be "better" and spend more years in development wilderness.

In the time X11 has been around, Apple has switched processor families twice and gone through two rewrites of the operating system (System 7 and OS X). Microsoft has gone from Windows 2 to Windows 3.1 (16 bit!) to Windows 95 to the NT based versions. Sun has gone from SunOS 4 to Solaris 2 and ceased to exist.

And you think starting in a new direction is an Open Source curse?

Toolkits that wrap X

[tepples]

I see plenty of people who depend on X being X, and plenty of people who are being advised to depend on X being X. A move to Wayland will create all kind of confusion for those people

Applications are typically not coded directly to X11; they're coded to toolkits that wrap X11. GTK+, Qt, and GNUstep could easily be ported to wrap Wayland, just as GTK+ and Qt have been ported to wrap GDI on Windows. In addition, X11 can run on top of Wayland, as one of the articles points out, much like X11 on Mac OS X runs on top of Quartz.

Re:X11

[3.1415926535]

X.org *is* X11. I think you meant XFree86 (which is also X11, by the way). That issue was political squabbling and an argument over whether or not forks are bad for open source projects. This is something entirely different.

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[Zo0ok]

Exactly... writing a simple application for X was arcane when I did it almost 10 years ago. Nobody really writes applications for X anymore - they write them for GTK, KDE.

What He actually said:

[Dcnjoe60]

For anyone who is interested, here is what Mark Shuttleworth actually said: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 . In his post he gives his reasoning and alternatives they looked at. Seems pretty well thought out. Ubuntu always gets slapped about not giving back to the community. Well, here they are announcing they are giving back and they still get slapped. It seems as if they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Being OLD is never a good excuse to replace it. There may be other issues that need addressing but OLD is never it. If anything, OLD is a good reason to keep it. It's "survival of the fittest" and X11 apparently outlasted many attempts to replace it.

Lusting after shiny objects and doing something solely because its new or trendy has always been an issue in the software development industry. Sometimes it's a good thing since it introduces new ways of doing things, and more frequently it's not.

Now if you said we need a more efficient method of handling large globs of data between the application and the local display device that would be a good reason, but OLD is never one. BTW, obsolescence due to lack of language support, it's written in a dead programming language or lack of use is not the same as OLD. Sorry about the rant about your using OLD as a reason. When I see OLD I see NIH.

Incidentally I think the timing for Wayland is a little off. Sure there are multimedia applications that will benefit from closer ties to the hardware, but the industry as a whole is trending once again to thin clients. If this continues to be the case, I see Wayland trying to reproduce what X11 already does and for a very long time at that.

Then again I find it somewhat odd that we take a very powerful OS platform and begin to remove its power in order to reduce its utility enough to make it more palatable for the single user desktop use case.

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[MostAwesomeDude]

The X.Org team has been planning X12 for years. http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12 is the roadmap. We will probably start X12 development as soon as all X11 bugs are fixed. (Haha, only serious.)

Also, what do you mean by "resources or balls?" Plenty of challengers have shown up over the years. DirectFB, Fresco, Berlin, Y Windows, etc. None of them displaced X because *X is a hell of a lot better than you give it credit for*. Wayland's developer realizes this; he's not trying to replace X, but to work alongside it.

Re:A bit big for their britches?

[MBGMorden]

Except that they're not really moving away from *Gnome*. They're no implementing Gnome-shell. You're talking about a tiny bit of the interface that Ubuntu will be using their own version of, not the whole DE. And in that regard, it's GNOME who are goofing this up. Gnome-shell is a radical shift from any current UI, and many, many users (including myself) have been stating their dissatisfaction with that interface since it was announced.

Instead of going that route, they're transitioning to a default UI that is based on an icon-dock - like BOTH the other mainstream desktop OS's use now. Instead of keeping the old X11 stuff, they're looking to transition to a technology that is tied much closer to the hardware and can provide much better performance for all the apps running locally . . . just like OS X and Windows do.

Ubuntu isn't being radical here. They're making a Linux DESKTOP system, and if they have to drag some people along kicking and screaming then so be it. There's a reason why "the year of Linux on the desktop" is always like the fruit trees out of Tantalus's reach - people keep dragging their feet and not making the tough calls. Why should everyone start whining when Ubuntu starts taking the steps needed to possibly make that pipe-dream a reality?

X in Wayland

[Tetsujin]

Backwards compatibility is achieved by (optionally) running X(server) as a sub-process of Wayland.

Isn't this inherently inefficient?

X is designed as a network-transparent windowing protocol first, with optimizations to improve performance on a local display added-on.

If you start with a display system that's optimized for local display, and then implement, on top of that, a network-transparent display system, there's no reason the implementation of the latter should be inherently less efficient than its direct implementation - unless the display server or the compatibility layer are implemented badly, or there's some level of incompatibility in the basic concepts of the two systems that makes a compatibility layer difficult to achieve.

I know very little about Wayland - but if it's largely based on DRI and OpenGL, then implementing X on top of that shouldn't have a significant negative impact on X performance.

Personally I'm not sure how I feel about moving away from a network-transparent rendering system. It's something I've grown used to in my years using X (about 1996-present). That alone is enough to make me uncomfortable with the change. I don't relish the idea of moving to a system where some apps will support remote display via X and others won't - or where I might have to choose between an X version of an app and a Wayland version... It reminds me of the situation on my Windows machine at work: choosing between Win32-native, and Cygwin/X versions of packages...

Though, on the other hand, how frequently do I actually use this feature? I use it for Emacs and a few other things, and that's about it. I never attempt running Firefox or Blender or GIMP or VLC remotely via X, I always just run those on the local machine. If my experience really is typical, then the network-transparency feature of X is being underused, typically, to the extent that it's not worth making it a design priority. (And, actually, I think people tend not to design Linux GUI apps with remote display in mind. I think they're more commonly developed for a local display, with the result that their behavior might be a bit too network-intensive or latency-sensitive to work with a remote display...) It might really be better to optimize for local display and then have remote display via a special layer: VLC or whatever else.

The Wayland FAQ was kind of interesting to read. It's interesting what they have to say about X's legacy baggage, for instance. Of course, I've heard a lot of this stuff before... I remember "Berlin" and GGI as a previous attempt at roughly the same thing. Maybe Wayland will yield a better result in the end? I don't know.

Re:Translation Please?

[Tetsujin]

Is "Wayland" a replacement for X Windows?

Basically, yes. The X Window System is a very old architecture by computing standards. It has served us well and I am not entirely comfortable with dismissing it... but the basic difference in approach here is that "Wayland" is strictly a local-display implementation, where X is built from the ground up to be network-transparent, with local-display enhancements added via extensions. The idea behind ditching network-transparency is to optimize graphics performance, making applications running on the local machine perform and behave better (i.e. giving video players the control they need to be able to synchronize video frames with the monitor's vertical blanking).

If so, does that also make it a replacement for the KDE and GNOME or do those two things sit on top of X windows?

The latter. Both KDE and GNOME can work directly on Wayland, I believe, if compiled for that.

What is Unity and how does it relate to GNOME or the KDE?

As I understand it, Unity is a window manager/desktop environment on which other applications can run. So it's like GNOME or KDE in that regard, but the GNOME and KDE projects themselves include a bunch of applications which could be run within the Unity environment... So they're not mutually exclusive things.

Is Ubuntu moving to these technologies because they use less resources are faster and will allow Ubuntu to work better on devices other than PCs?

Well, I think "less resources and faster" is basically what they're after with Wayland. A lot of what's included in X just isn't necessary or useful for modern applications. A lot of the things people are doing with slick GUI transitions and the like really aren't compatible with X's network transparency anyway.

With Unity I guess they're just trying to build a better GUI. Among other things it's supposed to be good for use on touchscreens (meaning, for instance, items on-screen have to be big enough to tap accurately with a finger...)

Re:GNOME Developers

[sarhjinian]

And this attitude is precisely why people get frustrated about reporting bugs.

Not all of us can or have the time to code, but we do have the time to fill out a bug report, thinking we're helping you find an issue. It seems a great system, and the various projects are generally pretty open about taking bug reports.

And then the bug sits there, gets reassigned, gets flagged as WORKSFORME, gets pushed back or obviated for the next version, etc, etc. I've caught bugs, gone to report them, noted that there's a similar bug that's been open since 2007 and, at that point just given up.

And you know, it's made all the worse by developers who either brush it off or, worse, make comments like the above. Experienced users who can't or don't code will work around it, but new users will just go away and never come back.

Not that closed source is necessarily much better, but at least it's more professional and less egotistical. Heck, I won't even say that this is the defining characteristic of all OSS projects (Zimbra, for example, does a pretty good job at this) but it's too common, and both Ubuntu's LaunchPad and Gnome's Bug Tracker are prime examples.

Is that the "open source way"? Or are you not fixing a bug that scores of users have taken the trouble to report over three years out of laziness, or is it some kind of nerd pride? What must we go, oh master?