MeeGo Being Ported To Wayland

An anonymous reader writes "From the MeeGo SF2011 conference this week it was disclosed that MeeGo may ship the Wayland Server with the tablet version of the MeeGo 1.3 operating system for release in October." A reasonably annotated version of the presentation slides. Unfortunately video of the talk is not yet available.

Comments

Here he comes... Cue ominous music!

[killfixx]

Kristian Høgsberg has been at the forefront for a while now. Imagine pulling an Apple/MS/Linux coup. "Subvert the dominant paradigm." That was my favorite saying (20 years ago). I'm happy to see ANYONE doing it. X has been the "paradigm" for so long that no one WANTED to challenge it. Kudos Kristian.

Re:Here he comes... Cue ominous music!

[jedidiah]

> Hate to break your bubble, but wayland is an X server.

No it isn't. Wayland is a rallying point for X-haters and is an attempt to specifically dump X.

Re:Here he comes... Cue ominous music!

[David Gerard]

>Wayland is a rallying point for X developers and is an attempt to specifically dump X.

Fixed that for you. Everyone working on Wayland is an X.org dev. They know what they're trying to kill off.

Oh, and Wayland will also have an X server.

Re:Here he comes... Cue ominous music!

[serviscope_minor]

Fixed that for you. Everyone working on Wayland is an X.org dev.

Quite. That's the problem. They've been working on X for ages and are bored and fed up with it. It's time for them to move on. Which is fine, but it doesn't mean it's time to kill off X.

They know what they're trying to kill off. Oh, and Wayland will also have an X server.

This is one of the disingenuous arguments trotted out like clockwork every time. You can get X servers for Windows and OSX. They both suck compared to Linux because the X clients are always second class programsn and don't integrate properly. It will be the same with Wayland.

Oh, and if they know what they're doing, then why the bone-headded decisions like making the *applications* paint windoe decoarions and be partially responsible for window management?

Stupid editors can't spell Waylon

[Anonymous Coward]

But good to see MeeGo embracing country music anyway.

(Mod me +1 funny or -1 offtopic, but don't bother trying to educate me -- I already know Wayland is a graphics server, like an X server "but better".)

Re:Not dead after all

[mickwd]

Yes, it is good to see that.

However, this kind of thing is precisely why Nokia dropped Meego. Nokia is in the business of selling phones, not on some never-ending quest for the ultimate Linux UI without ever getting something out of the door.

The mobile phone marketplace is very fast-moving. At some point, you need to stick with what already works, and polish it, instead of dropping it for the latest shiny instead.

The tragedy with Nokia is that they were 90% there with Maemo. While their competitors surged ahead, they dropped Maemo and virtually started afresh with something about 10% ready instead.

Re:What is it?

[suy]

You can think of MeeGo as "just" a Linux distribution. However, it's optimized and focused in bringing the usual Linux stack to all sorts of devices (TVs, cars, phones, tablets...).

It's a true open source project, or at least, it aims to be (is just beginning), and provides some sort of tools, and middleware. It's also a specification that you have to comply if you want to be MeeGo certified, so you can grant that software runs on all MeeGo devices.

Re:Not dead after all

[suy]

If anything, Nokia is exactly the one to blame for doing that. They broke compatibility across Maemo releases (IIRC).

In Maemo 5, when TrollTech and Qt was already in the company, they release the whole OS based on GTK+, but they say that the future is Qt (agreed), and release Qt 4.6 updates for the N900 with some specially crafted widgets for Maemo 5 integration. However, they are at the same time developing Qt Quick, which only appears in Qt 4.7, and yes, it's way better, but is yet another change for developers.

The change to Wayland is transparent for developers. They are expected to write stuff in Qt, so they should not worry about that.

Oh,and BTW, the next device from Nokia, is not MeeGo, is Harmattan (more or less Maemo 6). It's compatible WRT the API (uses Qt), but is still based on DEB, not RPM, so is not really MeeGo, and not binary compatible.

Will Wayland be network transparent?

[npsimons]

Oh, and Wayland will also have an X server.

You know what's really cool about my N900? I can export it's display across the network. I can also run graphical programs on my N900 off my laptop, file/print server or web/email server. Without tweaking, without rebooting, without having to start an X server or X server "compatibility mode" and without having to start some "remote desktop viewer". You know why? Because it runs X. I don't really have much of a problem with Wayland, except that they seem to think dumping network transparency is a good thing. Similarly, I don't have much of a problem with MeeGo, except they think that dumping apt-get and .debs in favor of RPMs is a good thing. "Those who don't understand UNIX . . ."

Re:Will Wayland be network transparent?

[maxwell demon]

Network transparency is a minor feature and certainly one which should not impede the local experience.

Compositing window management is a minor feature and certainly one which should not impede the network experience.

Besides, why do you think Wayland makes network transparency impossible?

Not exactly impossible. But it is based on shared buffers. Adding network transparency would mean that you continuously transfer buffers over the network, causing huge network traffic. Already today, modern X applications are often slow like morasses over "slow" internet connections (i.e. DSL). After reading the Wayland FAQ, I think I now understand why:

From the FAQ:
The problem with X is that... it's X. When you're an X server there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!) Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives.
I don't know what XFLDs are, but I don't consider the X server rendering fonts and providing graphics primitives a bad idea. But I guess if modern X programs indeed don't use those, this explains why they perform so badly over the network: They probably indeed render locally and push the pixels over the network.

But the fix is not to remove the functionality, the fix is making programs use it.