KDE Plans To Support Wayland In 2012

An anonymous reader writes "During the 2011 Desktop Summit plans were brought up by a KDE developer to support KDE on the Wayland Display Server, which is dubbed the successor to X11. The KDE Wayland support is expected to come in three phases, with the first two phases expected to be completed next year during the KDE SC 4.8 and 4.9 development cycles. Farewell X?"

Comments

Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't the KDE developers first fix the bugs that already exist in KDE 4.x before trashing it with Wayland?

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[dotancohen]

What bugs? Do you mean the bugs in KDE 4.0? They were mostly gone by KDE 4.2 and KDE 4.x surpassed KDE 3 when 4.4 was released. KDE 4.6 was pure gold and even 4.7 was recently introduced.

To which bugs are you referring?

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[Mitchell314]

The bug where KDE still is inferior to GNOME? :P

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[dotancohen]

The bug where KDE still is inferior to GNOME? :P

Oh, that one. I think that the Gnome 3 team is working on that bug!

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

so why does it still suck so hard (outside of you 4 fanboi's)

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you don't know what you're talking about?

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

As the Dalek said to the Cyberman, "You are only superior at DYING!"

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[dotancohen]

OK, I'll bite troll. What, quantitatively, shucks?

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[tzanger]

Let's see... korganizer reminder daemon generating a gazillion popup errors when the network is disconnected and it can't get to a remote calendar? kopete's history window being terribly slow and clunky? general input window slowness with large blocks of text (kmail generally, but other apps do it too)? general fucktardery with kontact's calendaring (timezone issues, slowness/laggy response, crashing)? akgregator becoming horribly, horribly slow when left idle "too long"? amarok being a steaming pile of shit since 4.x? the kde power daemon profiles not actually doing what they're set to do? plasma-desktop crashing out on a regular basis?

Is that enough to get you started? I've been using KDE since before 3.x and let's be honest: 4.x, even 4.7, is still an obese, steaming pile of bug-ridden feces. I try to be diligent and file the bug reports but very little seems to get done outside of the traditional games of hot potato between the respective Ubuntu and KDE teams.

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[mab]

Strigi not working since my home directory is on NFS.
nepomuk doing something that makes loging in take up to half an hour.

Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already?

[thePuck77]

OK, I'll bite troll. What, quantitatively, shucks?

Corn farmers?

Stupid

[mlwmohawk]

This is a mistake! X is one of the most flexible and useful systems today. Granted dumb users won't ever realize what they have in front of them, but the utility of X should not be under-estimated. I DO use it on a regular basis. Eliminating X, or even making it a second class citizen, is a huge loss in the philosophy that has allowed UNIX to survive for decades.

What will happen is that X will be "supported" as an X emulation layer on top of the latest display layer. Unfortunately, apps will abandon X because it will no longer be vigorously supported. Then it will be lost.

Here's what X can do today that we will lose: Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another. This is not the same as VNC or terminal services.

I hear all the dumbed down Linux users saying, that this isn't important, but like the people making these decisions, it is the point of view of ignorance. Computers are going in two directions..... Smaller devices and huge systems with many virtual machines. The huge systems with many virtual machines SCREAMS X for application display management. a 1:1 virtual desktop per virtual machine us unmanageable, but a window per app is. Eventually, there will only be a para-virtual manager and para-virtualized machines, each running apps. The VMs can be saved, restored, snap-shotted, backed-up, branched, etc. This will be the nature of how we run apps when we have a huge number of CPUs. X is a better fit now for the future, than any Windows/Mac inspired "improvement."

This is another Ill that is a direct result of people coming to Linux from a Mac or Windows background. They want to bring lesser ideas because they don't understand the capabilities of what they already have.

 

Re:Stupid

[Trepidity]

I'm not too sure what the actual use-cases driving it are, either. Is there anybody who's really that excited about fancy graphical window effects, except as a curiosity? The article mentions Compiz developers having trouble getting patches merged, which I hope is not the main driver--- the main thing holding back Linux on the desktop is not insufficiently fancy animations when you minimize a window.

Re:Stupid

[drinkypoo]

Here's what X can do today that we will lose: Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another. This is not the same as VNC or terminal services.

Lately I have it not work for me pretty often. Especially if there's any OpenGL. I can have two machines with GLX on them and yet my application crashes when I try to display it on the remote one... practically ANYTHING using OpenGL asplodes. Any more, that's the only thing I want to display remotely, because any old janky computer has enough power to run apps locally. It's not like when I was having to run Netscape on Linux displayed back to my SLC because it didn't have the power to run it satisfactorily.

Re:Stupid

[BeShaMo]

You kinda have a point.

Since we are for some reason going back to the mainframe doctrine of computing (with cloud computing), X, which were originally designed with mainframes, and centralised processing in mind, actually makes sense again.

The question is, how about the rest of us who wants something optimized for the desktop?

I personally don't believe (or hope) that we're not going to get rid of the X codebase overnight, certainly it has its place, but there are limitations where you can either choose to fix it, or decide that the application is not suitable for your purposes, and replace it with something that's better. I think for what a lot of people want to do with Linux, Wayland is better than X.

Re:Stupid

[Pieroxy]

So... Now that we know what X has that Wayland lacks, we are halfay there. What does Wayland has that X lacks? I personally don't know.

When we'll know that, we'll be able to express an informed opinion.

Anyone care to jump in to enlighten us?

Re:Stupid

[vlm]

Any more, that's the only thing I want to display remotely, because any old janky computer has enough power to run apps locally.

Sometimes, power doesn't matter. I can't run mythtv-setup locally. Unfortunately, its the only way I know of to configure a mythtv-backend, and its a X11 GUI. My mythtv-backend doesn't even have a graphics card, certainly not the mandatory $500 super 3-d type you'd need, and I'd not want to remove a tuner card to plug in a fancy 3-d card, just for occasional channel lineup changes...

Re:Stupid

[drinkypoo]

But that's a retarded failing of MythTV that can be worked around with X11 as a band-aid... I mean, that's clearly not the Unix Way (tm) :)

Do you really need a fancy graphics card just to run MythTV?

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Touch based usage is all about fancy effects. If you don't believe me, take a look at success of Apple lately.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

You have four options:

1. Complain about people who want the "fancy animations" and end up losing X11. Let's face it, it's rare for people to complain their way into a mutually beneficial situation. This seems to be the option everyone is going for at the moment...

2. Help X11 by fixing what people perceive to be wrong with it. Maybe then you'll also see how bloated and painful it is to work with X11... (ultimately, that's the REAL reason we're seeing a rise of Wayland). You don't have to agree, you just have to realize that the people who disagree with you are about to overpower your choice. The mantra of "well, if they want it (the fancy animations), they should add it to X11 themselves or shut up" has failed you. Instead, someone has written an increasingly viable alternative which lacks features YOU want. Which leads me to ...

3. If you want these important features of X11 so bad, you should code them into Wayland yourself! (Oh snap! No he didn't!)

4. Sit back and do nothing. This would be the most preferable if you don't really have anything to add. It's like option 1, except you stop wasting your time. :)

Re:Stupid

[Theovon]

It's a myth that Wayland lacks network transparency. It currently doesn't DEFINE it, but it doesn't LACK it. That may sound like a semantic game, but it's the same as saying that X11 lacks policy, which is imposed by the window manager, a separate program. Wayland provides drawing surfaces to applications and then composites them onto the screen. There are many different ways in which the drawing surfaces can get moved from the client to the server for display. Locally, they're the same memory space. With remote applications, you can either move pixels, or you can have the rendering API send commands over the network.

Re:Stupid

[rjha94]

I agree with the part that X lets you display what is happening on remote machine to your local terminal (virtualization) part. Just sending the bitmaps/buffers back and forth is very primitive (VNC) and does not perform well. And yes, people short circuiting that part just to say that yeah! everything is running on this box only miss that part. on the other hand, X is old and crumbling around and I am not sure about the audio/video etc support for modern devices and hardware. Maybe an X done for today;s world is the answer.

Re:Stupid

[jones_supa]

It's not only about some specific effects but also about having a generally smooth and intuitive desktop experience. Plus it's nice to have the small flicker here and there eliminated which rids the traditional desktops.

Re:Stupid

[vlm]

But that's a retarded failing of MythTV that can be worked around with X11 as a band-aid...

And after X11 is gotten rid of, and there is no bandaid... The only benefit the GUI provides over a config file is its semi-adaptive. From memory, you set up the capture card, THEN it shows up as an option in the thingy that links cap card hardware to channel lineups or whatever. The only benefit the GUI provides over a text CLI is during channel icon selection. The only benefit the GUI provides over a web based interface, is you don't need to set up / maintain / security patch a web server and some operations like channel scanning can take minutes to return results, far longer than most browsers/servers will tolerate.

It can probably be worked around with some effort and annoyance. Which is not worth it if the only benefit of the new technology platform is useless trendy eyecandy "now, with see thru xterm backgrounds".

Do you really need a fancy graphics card just to run MythTV?

Isn't the whole point of the Wayland project that you'd require a "fancy graphics card" just to run a xterm / konsole / xfce terminal? Might not be able to make it past the animated 3-D video login screen without a $500 card.

Re:Stupid

[ThePhilips]

I have seen video of Keith Packard's talk which was providing quite a lot of reasons why Wayland or something similar is the way to go forward. The talk was centered on X protocol and architecture and how it works for modern applications. (Executive summary: very poorly.)

One of the main points was that most applications (both KDE and GNOME) do not use X anymore. Largest part of X is related to the 2D graphics and font rendering. Yet, most applications do not use X for that anymore and render everything by themselves, sending to X only the final image to display. X became a simple display driver with a fancy network interface. Why the layer is needed at all?

Another memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.

So those behind Wayland are not only bubbling windows fanatics - but also people who want to stream-line Linux' graphics stack.

P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.

Re:Stupid

[mlwmohawk]

X is old and crumbling around

Yes, it does need some cleanup, but every mature piece of software does. The number of man-decades of expertise and knowledge embodied in X is staggering. You will not be able to re-create what it does in less than 15 years of vigorous development with a large team.

I am not sure about the audio/video etc support for modern devices and hardware

Standardized extensions are the way to go. Create a group, publish an RFC, create an implementation, hope for adoption. That's the democracy of open source.

Re:Stupid

[mlwmohawk]

It's a myth that Wayland lacks network transparency. It currently doesn't DEFINE it, but it doesn't LACK it.

OMG, that is the worst twist of logic that I have ever seen. That's like saying my Jeep doesn't lack flight, it just doesn't define or come with wings. NOT HAVING IT AS A DEMONSTRABLE DESIGN GOAL MEANS THAT IT DOESN'T HAVE IT. In other words, Wayland lacks network transparency.

Re:Stupid

[arcctgx]

Is there anybody who's really that excited about fancy graphical window effects, except as a curiosity?

Open source developers want to experiment, and they implement pseudo-features that most regular users neither want or need. For this reason, the latest versions of major desktop environments (Gnome 3 / KDE 4) are fundamentally broken. Wayland simply follows the same trend.

Re:Stupid

[grumbel]

This is a mistake! X is one of the most flexible and useful systems today.

It's also decades old and full of cruft, does no longer properly model how our hardware works and only held together by an endless number of extensions.

Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another.

Yeah and as soon as you want something more complicated, such as move an application from one display to another while its already running you run into issues. Something simple as changing color depth at runtime, something that Windows could do since at least Win98, if not already Win95, is still impossible in X11. The reason why I can't use the scroll wheel on my keyboard in X11 is because some arcane part of the protocol or implementation or whatever though that 256 keys ought to be enough for everybody. And there are plenty of more issues, be it multitouch, security or whatever.

Now I don't know what Wayland will or will not fix of those issues, but X11 certainly is showing its age.

Re:Stupid

[dbIII]

That's pretty crappy apps then - I was running OpenGL stuff from an SGI machine on a linux pentium75 machine with a fairly crappy video card in 2000. I haven't noticed much in the way of trouble since then - what application are you running that is crashing all of the time?
As for never having to run remote apps - bullshit. Do you think those 48 CPU boxes are running on peoples desks?

Re:Stupid

[jmknsd]

Hi, I am working on making a networking client/server that will enable this remote window functionality in wayland for my Google summer of Code project. Since each Application communicates with the compositor over a socket has it's own framebuffer, doing a RFB like protocol and forwarding this protocol is pretty straightforward, conceptually.

This is my first open source project and I won't have it working by the end of the summer, but I will stick with it until it is done, and I know at least one other professional developer who has his own ideas and will probably run with it should I fail. This is an important feature and it will be implemented.

Re:Stupid

[maxwell demon]

Network transparency isn't something you can bolt on after the fact. It's something you have to build in from the beginning, or it will suck. Otherwise you'd not have such crutches like VNC.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've read, the problem doesn't seem to be with X's server-client design - it seems to be with the implementation, which is 24 years old and was designed to consider things like running both black-and-white screens and colour screens in the same log-in - stuff that's no longer relevant.

So it begs the question: if we're going to break the graphics stack (which moving to Wayland will do anyway), wouldn't it be better to release a new and refined X12 based around the server-client design and be done with it?

Re:Stupid

[dkf]

It's not only about some specific effects but also about having a generally smooth and intuitive desktop experience. Plus it's nice to have the small flicker here and there eliminated which rids the traditional desktops.

But you can get that with X11. Intuition is not built at the basic graphics library layer anyway, and never ever was (it resides at a higher level). Smooth running? That again is a matter of correct programming (e.g., getting the handling of buffers right) as the fact that some X11 apps have been running smoothly for decades will testify. Going to Wayland will not fix these sorts of problems.

OTOH, there are things that it will fix. For example, it's finally just about becoming limiting that window dimensions have to fit in 16 bits. And it will also mean that some legacy nastiness can be dropped. (I so wish I'd never had to understand the mess that is visuals. Complex, confusing and long obsolete.)

Re:Stupid

[sgt scrub]

As someone who constantly uses Xnest and Xming on a daily bases I say, you tell them mlwmohawk! There is NO other GUI environment that allows applications from several different machines in different locations to run seamlessly on the desktop. I currently have two sessions of Code::Blocks up. One is from my server development machine. The other is on the client development machine. I also have an application running on a third machine that controls VMs (4 attackers and 4 victims) set up to send traffic through the server machine. In that application there are VNC instances for windows machines watching the attacks which I currently have showing on my desktop number 5. This allows me to change attack vectors according to my tests in real time according to the changes I make on my client development machine and see the results and make changes to the server. In other words, all I have to do to make any change or see any effect is to click on the correct rectangle at the top of my screen. NO other GUI environment allows me to do that.

Re:Stupid

[siride]

What's bloated and slow about X11? Aside from crappy drivers (for some people), most of the slow issues have been fixed. Bloat is commonly levelled at X11, but it's not really substantiated.

Re:Stupid

[sgt scrub]

Wayland uses X for "network transparency".

Re:Stupid

[MrKaos]

This is a mistake! X is one of the most flexible and useful systems today.

This is another Ill that is a direct result of people coming to Linux from a Mac or Windows background. They want to bring lesser ideas because they don't understand the capabilities of what they already have.

You are right and I agree with you be, shit son, if ever there was a useful piece of software that needed a massive overhaul/refactor it is X11. Don't get me wrong I love what I can do with X11 but it is a world unto itself in terms of understanding it. Configuring X11 is so fucking frustrating and it was one of the things I would dread when re-installing a Linux box and one of the big reasons I switched to Ubuntu, there are some things I just couldn't be bothered doing and I just want it to work and not have to think about it.

Even now in Ubuntu I still find myself editing xorg.conf files and I fucking hate it. Yes X11 is great but it seems to have one of the lowest returns on investing in learning it conpared to returns of getting your screens working. yes ssh, -X -Y, but my cli-fu is so good why would I bother with a gui anyway. I only export a gnome-terminal via ssh when I am using an X11 layer on Win7 so I can have multiple shell sessions going in a single window at work.

So, fuck it, as someone with over 20 years with X11 if canonical are going to take it to the next level of usability then I'm all for it. If the only thing you are worried about is having remote gui session then make that work in wayland and be done with it. I'm happy with C, or ina kernel but X11 makes my head explode with it's friggin sync rates and all the rest of that stuff.

Oh and by the way Canonical stop pissing around with the flashy stuff and fix shit up like copying mp3s to music players in album order. I've moved a few users over to Ubuntu from Windows and you are starting to confuse my users - don't make me look like a jerk, have another Paper Cuts session and fix some of the basics up.

And do it soon.

Re:Stupid

[siride]

No, the parent is right. All wayland cares about is that it gets pixmaps for window contents. It doesn't matter where they come from. It's underspecified, and therefore open to be implemented in a wide variety of ways. The same is not true for your jeep.

Re:Stupid

[siride]

It's already effectively network transparent because it still uses a client-server architecture. The fact that it doesn't specify the details in the core implementation makes it more flexible with network transparency, not less.

Re:Stupid

[Elbereth]

I wish that you had posted this from a logged in account, so that I could friend you.

Re:Stupid

[drinkypoo]

No, Wayland makes all that stuff possible, but there is absolutely nothing preventing the implementation of a frame buffer interface drawn by the CPU. And by the same token, nothing preventing exporting Wayland to X (or VNC, or...) through a similar mechanism.

Re:Stupid

[dbIII]

other memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.

So somebody that has not even heard of the root window is trying to tell us all what X can or can't do and getting it wrong?
BTW, the gnome and kde comments also show a lack of understanding - there's more to X than a widget set and ultimately the important thing is getting the images from whatever to where the user can see it.

Re:Stupid

[kvvbassboy]

I am one of the "dumb" users who don't need network transparency for their display servers, but if I remember right X Server does run as a client to Wayland. In this sense I would not call it an emulation layer, but rather an abstraction layer.

The use case you mention is very real and ubiquitous in everyday situations. The computers in my university labs just cannot work without X. I am pretty sure it will not die out.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

only held together by an endless number of extensions.

As opposed to redesigning everything from scratch every time we want to add a new feature?

Re:Stupid

[warrax_666]

other memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.

So somebody that has not even heard of the root window is trying to tell us all what X can or can't do and getting it wrong?

Fullscreen has never worked satisfactorily for me, personally. There would always be some weirdness which made it practically useless.

[...] and ultimately the important thing is getting the images from whatever to where the user can see it.

... and X11 is an absurdly complex way of doing that. Wayland does exactly this is a much simpler and more efficient way.

Re:Stupid

[ThePhilips]

So somebody that has not even heard of the root window is trying to tell us all what X can or can't do and getting it wrong?

I'm pretty sure Keith Packard, as a lead of X.org, has heard of the root window.

Here is the video I was referring to: X and the future of Linux Graphics.

Re:Stupid

[Zhiroc]

Count me as skeptical as to whether this is a good thing or not. I suppose one key aspect is how easy it will be to develop applications that are compatible with whatever the user is running. One thing I have to point out though, is that X11's greatest strength--virtualization--is also its greatest weakness. I work at home via a VPN connection to my company, and have about a 100ms ping time or so, and I can say that I'll run a remote display only under duress. It's slow to the point of being maddening. I will rather run a VNC desktop because that actually performs tons better. Of course, VNC is built on top of X11, but as long as something like that is possible, it isn't necessary to have a native remote window system.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The code itself is what I was talking about. The reason why no one wants to work with X11 is because it's very difficult to code in. The code is bloated and painful to work with. All it takes is a quick glance at the code to see why Wayland was born. Very few individuals could work with X11's code, and they didn't seem to be interested in keeping it going until there was competition.

Re:Stupid

[celle]

"Wayland uses X for "network transparency"."

And since X will no longer be maintained so much for that.
Need examples of lack of maintenance: User level display drivers, xfree86, etc.
Everyone of value will jump and X will die a slow death of bitrot.

Re:Stupid

[washu_k]

I know I'll probably get modded down for this, but anyway... Microsoft (and/or Citrix) seems to have done a pretty decent job of bolting on remote display to Windows after the fact. In most real-world ways RDP is much nicer than remote X.

Re:Stupid

[DrXym]

It's not just about fancy effects. If you can hold the contents of each window as a surface and get the GPU to render it, the CPU is freed up to be doing other things. It makes the entire experience fast as well as allowing useful things like thumbnails, scaled windows, transparency to happen cheaply. It may be it makes the experience more flashy which I don't see as a bad thing assuming its done with some restraint. Dumping X will make things even faster because there won't be an obstinately 2D, largely obsolete, context switching bottle neck that everything has to run through.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really true. Client/server isn't something you can bolt on after the fact, but if you've got solid client-server architecture, you can make third-party tunneling apps provide the net link while looking like a server to clients and like a client to the server.

Don't believe me? OpenSSH does just that with the X tunneling mode (it's of course possible to tunnel X via an ordinary TCP tunnel, but much more trouble, which is why they added dedicated X tunneling), which is entirely bolted on after the fact and will work through UNIX sockets even if your X server is running with no TCP support.

I'm not a huge fan of ditching X, but the networking issue's not a real good argument.

Re:Stupid

[celle]

"if we're going to break the graphics stack (which moving to Wayland will do anyway), wouldn't it be better to release a new and refined X12 based around the server-client design and be done with it?"

Finally someone asked, how about an answer as I don't see a reason for X12 not coming into existence either.

Re:Stupid

[jedidiah]

The main problem with Wayland is that it will force a hard reset of device drivers.

The state of Linux device drivers will be reset back to 1994. Any progress that has been made in those intervening years will be flushed straight down the toilet. Whatever advantage you gain from flushing X will be undone by poor quality of drivers and incomplete feature support.

Re:Stupid

[jedidiah]

Yes. And it took them about 10 or 15 years of retrofitting it to get it right too.

RDP doesn't demonstrate that the design of Wayland can be half-assed. RDP demonstrates why key X features are still relevant. In fact, they are more relevant than ever.

If anything, the rest of the world has come around to our way of thinking and now we want to abandon it in favor something like VNC running on top of MacOS which is even uglier than what we have now.

Re:Stupid

[jedidiah]

...and all of this ranting argues for an overhaul of xorg rather than dumping it.

Although why you would need to bother with X config files in this day and age is a bit of a mystery.

Re:Stupid

[jmknsd]

I was under the impression that once the closed source drivers implemented KMS and other features, they could be used. I am using Intel's current drivers and they support Wayland well.

Re:Stupid

[jedidiah]

Are you kidding? VNC doesn't even run well enough on a high speed LAN.

RDP might be a worthy example to hold up and to bash X with. VNC is not.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the web already took all your X away in most ways.

Re:Stupid

[laffer1]

In that case, I say let the linux zealots do wayland but give us X. They are clearly in not-invented-here syndrome. I'm tired of it. More and more free desktop projects are under the GPL. If they want to do wayland, just go in a corner and do it. Don't screw everyone else in the process. By everyone, I mean all non Linux users. (yes even windows users have x-windows servers available)

There is a clear need for non linux people to take leadership in Xorg as well as starting a graphical desktop environment project. There has to be a stable alternative to the crazy shenanigans going on with Gnome, KDE, Wayland and Ubuntu folks.

Re:Stupid

[smash]

If you need X11 run X11. If you want to do advanced 3d desktop effects, don't. However, remote display has moved on since X11 was designed.

X11 can do remote display of apps running on a server, but it carries with it 20 years+ of baggage for functionality that perhaps 1-2% of users will ever use.

Besides, there are better ways of supporting X11. Personally i would suggest that the way forward is to move to wayland and then implement an X11 layer on top. Like the Mac UI has. I can run remote X11 stuff on my mac just fine, but i don't have all the garbage from legacy X11 getting in the way of 3d composting, etc.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Wayland is a RedHat project.

Re:Stupid

[Zhiroc]

On a high-latency WAN, using firefox as the benchmark, VNC is better from my experience. My guess is that it uses a lot of synchronous requests, and if you can only get about 10 requests/sec (at 100ms ping), it really adds up.

Re:Stupid

[smash]

You mean like how apple bolted on an X11 client into OS X. Or how there are various X11 clients for Windows. Or how Metaframe or RDP kick the shit out of remote X11 in terms of performance? Yes i have used remote X11. Remote display technology has moved on, significantly.

Re:Stupid

[maxwell demon]

X is already a networked protocol, all what ssh does is sending the commands through its networked channel. AFAIU Wayland depends heavily on shared memory. Good luck with making that network transparent.

Re:Stupid

[maxwell demon]

Can you display native OS X applications on a remote X display? Or native Windows applications? No? That's what I'm concerned about. Yes, you will always be able to display X applications remotely, as long as you have an X server running. But the problem is that if Wayland gets standard, new applications will most likely not be X applications, but Wayland applications.

Re:Stupid

[Short Circuit]

P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.

When I first heard about Wayland, I dropped into their IRC channel to ask if they were at least going to support network transparency. I was told that it was a low priority. Which tells me that it's not even going to highly considered in their API designs.

I expect it to act like VNC, at best. Which is going to royally suck.

Re:Stupid

[yourmommycalled]

Hurray! some one else get's it! Yes, the dumbed down linux weenies who think they are hotshot programmers because they spent a few hours playing with the windowing theme have screwed the pouch. I really don't care if my xterm is transparent, or sings or dances or has any window animations at all. I need the graphics card to be able to animate a 3-D plume of hazardous materials in real-time not stuttering because some lame-assed linux developer thinks my windows should rotate and disappear in a puff when I move the cursor out of the window.

Re:Stupid

[visualight]

They think that their use case (laptop at starbucks) is the one that most people care about. There doesn't seem to be enough developers that work in a data center or other multi-user environment. Well, there might be, but as you said they came from Windows and don't realize how convenient and powerful remote X11 really is.

Re:Stupid

[maxwell demon]

Another memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.

So the full screen games I've played on Linux didn't exist?

Re:Stupid

[Zhiroc]

Some timings. These are between the same Solaris 10 server and Ubuntu 10.10 client. X11 is via SSH port forwarding (unfortunately, it appears that Ubuntu doesn't even turn on X11 TCP connections, and I'd have to restart my display to set that up) and VNC is via a remote desktop. The times given are between issuing the command and the window being displayed, measured by a stopwatch.

• xterm: 11.5s via X11, 1.5s via VNC
• firefox: 56.5s via X11, 16s via VNC

Additionally, when I went to quit FF on the X11 connection, it took about 30s to display the File menu, while my system was frozen in a server grab.

Re:Stupid

[maxwell demon]

How many drivers for graphics cards no longer sold, but still in use, will be updated to use KMS?

Re:Stupid

[fnj]

Replacing X is just part of a widespread movement to dumb down linux. Look at Gnome3, Ubuntu Unity, and to some extent KDE4 for more examples. We are at a crossroads here, with some trying to build the kind of logically extrapolated architecture you envision, with true power, and others who only see computers as toys.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Keith Packard hasn't heard of the root window... Fucking retard.

Re:Stupid

[ThePhilips]

They do, but it is a fake, it is just a window stretched to cover the whole screen.

In X it's impossible to reliably change screen resolution without affecting windows of other applications.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

nvidia has stated that they "have no plans to support wayland" in their proprietary drivers. that could change in the coming years when wayland becomes more stable, but personally i dont see that happening.

Re:Stupid

[jmknsd]

Not only do the current OSS drivers have pretty good support for older cards, but they are currently the only option for using ATI and Nvidia cards. The performance might not be as good, but it is getting better, especially on older cards.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Like most people who feel they have a right to an opinion about stuff they don't understand, you always speak in these pejorative generalities. Try learning something sometime.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE's leadership already doesn't see the point of X; that's why they were so eager to ditch their ARTS network-transparent sound server, because they couldn't imagine anyone really wanting to be able to run a program on one computer and hear sounds on another.

(I thought PulseAudio was supposed to provide that feature, but damned if I can figure out how. It would help if there was, like, any documentation at all. Linux-based desktops have been getting less and less useful as their developers try to make them more and more like Windows, which is fucking stupid because everyone who wants their desktop to behave like Windows is going to use Windows. Fucking hell. Slackware, here I come ...)

Re:Stupid

[abigor]

What's stopping you from maintaining X once "everyone of value" leaves?

Re:Stupid

[washu_k]

Don't know about OSX, but Windows applications can be displayed remotely just like X apps. Even on X with an RDP client. Despite the common way of sending the whole desktop, individual Windows apps can be displayed remotely. It's actually much better than X because RDP is much faster, can move running apps from one display to another and will survive network drops.

Re:Stupid

[maxwell demon]

Indeed, I've disabled 3D effects (Compiz) on all computers, in part because they interfered with programs using 3D (TuxRacer, to be exact :-)). Another reason was that most of the effects just got annoying after short time.

Re:Stupid

[washu_k]

RPD demonstrates just how old and outdated X really is. RDP was bolted on after the fact yet is way better than X remotely. If Wayland adds some way of using applications remotely it should emulate RDP, not X

In what way is X better than RDP? RDP is MUCH faster, handles network issues, can be moved between systems or local displays, handles sound, etc. It really is a much better system in the real world.

Re:Stupid

[visualight]

Network transparency is an all or nothing scenario. Right now, *ALL* applications are network transparent because X is.

The response from from Wayland supporters is that applications will be "free" to build support for network transparency into the application.

UNACCEPTABLE. Every window of every application just like X does now, or it might as well not exist.

Re:Stupid

[npsimons]

Yet, most applications do not use X for that anymore and render everything by themselves, sending to X only the final image to display. X became a simple display driver with a fancy network interface. Why the layer is needed at all?

Okay, if this is the case, why is Wayland ignoring network transparency? Fine, the X rendering layer isn't used anymore and should go away; maybe the entirety of X should go away; why does it immediately follow that network transparency should go away? Don't throw out the baby with the bath water.

Another memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.

That's funny, I could have sworn I used to run all sorts of games full screen, across multiple monitors no less, since at least 2001. And yes, this was Linux with X11, with games that made heavy use of OpenGL (NWN, Unreal, etc).

So those behind Wayland are not only bubbling windows fanatics - but also people who want to stream-line Linux' graphics stack.

Fine, but I ask again - why does network transparency have to go? I might be more convinced that those behind Wayland weren't bubbling Windows fanatics if their solution to the remote GUI apps problem wasn't the same as Windows and MacOSX. No, remote desktops in their own window *isn't* good enough. If I really wanted that, I can *choose* it, but I'm not *forced* to run remote GUI apps that way.

I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.

And this exact same feeling is why others are wailing so loudly against Wayland.

Re:Stupid

[maxwell demon]

OK, but if I understand you correctly, that's done via RDP, completely independent of X11. Wayland doesn't have RDP.

Does RDP allow everything X11 allows (or, everything X11 allows which is actually used)? And if so, is it patent encumbered or similar? Because if it really works so well, I'd consider it a good idea to replace X11 with that. As a bonus, it would be possible to natively show remote Linux applications on Windows computers and vice versa, without installing separate software to do so.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily; there will be native network transparency for Wayland just as soon as someone writes it.

Re:Stupid

[jmknsd]

I am working on implementing a standalone remote Wayland application that would enable the functionality that the GP mentioned.

Wayland also brings to the table improved performance, and the freedom for each developer to use whatever means they want to generate their own framebuffer to the compositor. This means that Wayland won't need to be updated in 10 years to remove old, useless primatives and add new ones, like many others here are suggesting we do with X now.

There is a nice website with an explanation of the architecture here: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html and they have a FAQ as well.

Re:Stupid

[washu_k]

I know Wayland doesn't have RDP or apparently any remote capability right now. My point was that RDP demonstrates that a "bolt on after the fact" can not only work really well, but can work better than something like X that was designed for network transparency.

X may have been designed and built from the ground up with network transparency, but that doesn't mean it's actually any good at it.

I don't know if RDP has feature parity with X, but as far as I can tell everything that is actually used in X is possible in RDP. Patents I have no idea, but there are some non MS things that implement it already. Virtualbox for example.

Re:Stupid

[Tubal-Cain]

nvidia has stated that they "have no plans to support wayland" in their proprietary drivers.

That's OK. X will still be around for years to come; plenty of time for Nvidia to change their minds, OSS drivers to catch up, or to drop Nvidia while building a new box.

Re:Stupid

[Urkki]

OMG, that is the worst twist of logic that I have ever seen. That's like saying my Jeep doesn't lack flight, it just doesn't define or come with wings. NOT HAVING IT AS A DEMONSTRABLE DESIGN GOAL MEANS THAT IT DOESN'T HAVE IT. In other words, Wayland lacks network transparency.

Wayland doesn't support network transparency the same way as eg. TCP/IP doesn't support encryption.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Read about SPICE and RDP, these protocols will allow Wayland to redirect single windows and the full root window.

Re:Stupid

[Trepidity]

Hmm, interesting; thanks for the link. I hadn't realized that the X.org people are moving in the same direction. Doing a bit of googling, this LWN article summarizes a Packard talk from last year that seems to be hitting some similar points.

Re:Stupid

[richlv]

x11 in general - seems to work just fine. remote x11, especially over a high latency link... ouch.
it is an extremely chatty protocol and, as far as i know, no reasonable caching is built-in.

granted, for the time it was developed (and for local use today) it was just fine. but i have to use remote x fairly often over slow connections. well, not really, i'm using nx (because plain x is totally unusable) - but that's closing source and it's session management is extremely terrible.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The one single way X is better is that it can remote single windows - RDP is always the whole screen. MS has some sort of hack to achieve a similar result, but that's done in the same way VMWare does floating windows - it paints the whole screen, but with bits masked out. Moving windows quickly still lets you see the wallpaper...

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

VNC makes bulk transfers of framebuffer chunks. This means it needs bandwidth, but isn't much affected by latency.

"Classic" X uses drawing commands, and lots of them. This means it works OK in very low bandwidth by today's standards, but the multiple roundtrips kills you with moderate latency.

Modern toolkits using X wind up drawing things in pixmaps and dumping them out with X commands, inheriting X's latency sensitivity, while driving bandwidth up comparable to VNC, and frequently not being as smart about sending _changes_ instead of the whole pixmap, can sometimes be even worse for bandwidth.

It also varies by your VNC client and especially server implementations. Some of them are incredibly stupid about how often and how much to send, and I haven't seen one yet that really gets JPEG compression "right", which IMO means selectively using JPEG only when there's large updates to be sent, and remembering the "dirty" regions to re-send them with lossless compression when there's idle time.

Re:Stupid

[man_of_mr_e]

I'm pretty sure they say it's a low priority because X is still the common use for that. First priority is to get the thing viable in the most common situation, using X for network transparency. There's no reason a display server can't be both wayland and X at the same time.

That doesn't mean they're not thinking about network transparency, but just making it a "TO DO".

Re:Stupid

[Mad Merlin]

2. Help X11 by fixing what people perceive to be wrong with it. Maybe then you'll also see how bloated and painful it is to work with X11... (ultimately, that's the REAL reason we're seeing a rise of Wayland). You don't have to agree, you just have to realize that the people who disagree with you are about to overpower your choice. The mantra of "well, if they want it (the fancy animations), they should add it to X11 themselves or shut up" has failed you. Instead, someone has written an increasingly viable alternative which lacks features YOU want. Which leads me to ...

This would be counterproductive. By far the most common complaint I see about X is "OMG IT'S SLOW BECAUSE IT ALWAYS RUNS OVER THE NETWORK!!!!!!!!". However, on a local display, X uses a domain socket for communication, basically the fastest method available. So, the perceived problem isn't actually a problem at all, "fixing" it would be a mistake.

As far as I can tell, anyone who's backing Wayland has no actual concrete complaints about X, they just feel the need to rewrite everything from scratch (a common problem, unfortunately). Furthermore, in all I've read about Wayland, it doesn't bring anything to the table except fewer features and newer (buggier) code.

I don't know if you've noticed, but KDE and Gnome (and others) already have lots of fancy animations, and they didn't need to rewrite X to get it done.

Re:Stupid

[Short Circuit]

I'm familiar with RDP; that's the protocol Windows Terminal Services has used for years. I hadn't heard about SPICE, though.SPICE looks nice, but which version (or which extensions) of RDP is to be used?

Furthermore, my day job has had me spend many hours writing high-performance C++ code for Win32. RDP is a PITA. For applications which are already running, it pulls tricks like changing the display depth on-the-fly. We had to fall back to using GDI+ (which is slow, but hardware thankfully caught up) to maintain general compatibility.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

Exactly, this opens competition in network transparency as well, Wayland eventually could use different protocols for network transparency allowing competition in that area as well. Imagine different protocols for network transparency competing against each other. Each protocol providing a different level of compression for networking and so on. Wayland is great and it will only enhance Linux. Go Wayland!

Re:Stupid

[Mad Merlin]

I was under the impression that once the closed source drivers implemented KMS and other features, they could be used. I am using Intel's current drivers and they support Wayland well.

Yes, also, once the heat death of the universe happens, we won't need to worry about it anymore. The Nvidia blob and fglrx don't support KMS or other required features and have no plans to do so.

Re:Stupid

[man_of_mr_e]

Who says it does have to go? I think they're only acknowleding that X is better at network transparency at this point. Certainly, a display server can handle both X protocol and wayland interfacing at the same time, or at worst running an X server on top of wayland.

The point is, 9x% of users use X locally now. Focus on that, and when that is good, then you can turn to network transparency. And you know what? That would allow them to focus the attention on network transparency it deserves, rather than shoehorning it in as an all of nothing proposition.

Re:Stupid

[jelle]

The 'democracy of open source' is that if someone wants to make it, he can, and if it's better than the other thing out there (or the only thing), people will start to use it.

X has had the advantage of being the only display server out there (no I'm not counting fbdev, libsvga etc). Well, with Wayland it will have some serious competition. May the best display server win!

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

I assume Wayland will be able to use SPICE, RDP, VNC, and so on, allowing competition in this area as well, and I'm sure individual windows and the full window root will be able to send over the network with these protocols.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

What about SPICE? I'm sure Wayland will be able to use all of those protocols, allowing competition, which is a good thing.

Re:Stupid

[man_of_mr_e]

Not true at all. You're confusing two things. You assume that because network transparency is not built-in from the start, that network transparency was not taken into account in the design. If the design is flexible enough to allow network transparency to be added later, and perhaps it was even designed with the ability to add it later in mind... then yes, youy can bolt it on after the fact.

My understanding is that Wayland was designed with that in mind. It's like complaining that you can't have window managers in X because X wasn't written with a window manager.

Re:Stupid

[man_of_mr_e]

Most uses of X depend heaviliy on shared memory as well, but they can be remoted just fine. I fail to understand your point.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

Agreed. Wayland will do to Linux, we need a change.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

No, you don't get it. Wayland isn't about adding a "feature". It's about having a clean foundation that will be useful for now and the future. X is showing its age.

Re:Stupid

[siride]

My understanding is that a lot of that is because of inefficiencies in the toolkit. Granted, there's no reason the protocol couldn't be a little bit cleaner, of course.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

I agree with you completely. We need a change and Wayland will do only do good to us. I also hate configuring Xorg with that shitty xorg.conf file. Wayland will be able to reconfigure all by itself I think, since it will use KMS.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

a xorg.conf is still needed these days with current Xorg, just look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ or something like that.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't say that X11 was slow. The code is difficult to work with, however. Hence, you have very few people who are able/willing to work on it.

Re:Stupid

[man_of_mr_e]

There is NO other GUI environment that allows applications from several different machines in different locations to run seamlessly on the desktop.

Totally untrue. RDP allows that just fine. It's called RemoteApp.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

Wayland will be able to use SPICE/RDP, etc, allowing you to redirect single windows and the full desktop across the network.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

How about SPICE? I'm sure Wayland will be able to use both SPICE/RDP.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

I agree, a change will only do good to Linux as well, we need Wayland.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

Wayland isn't about wobbly windows. It's about using resources efficiently.

Re:Stupid

[bjourne]

X11 is a protocol, X.Org is an implementation of it. The protocol specfication is here: http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/x11proto/proto.html As you can see, the protocol is pretty bloat for something that is mostly just managing your display buffer these days. The protcol commands for drawing arcs were all the rage in the 80's but are not at all used these days. Then there are all the extensions such as SHM, Composite, xrandr, XAA and probably a dozen more. All these specifications that has to be implemented creates a very bloated piece of software with lots of features almost noone ever uses.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

We realize how powerful network transparency is, and it will be possible with Wayland and RDP/SPICE, and similar protocols.

Re:Stupid

[siride]

The thing about those extra protocol bits is that having them around doesn't really cause any problems. If you don't need to use them, don't. Use the faster parts instead. Most X development is focused on making the modern parts fast and forgetting about the old stuff, or maintaining it only to the degree that it still works. The existing implementation is a sunk cost to the X server.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

PulseAudio can send audio over the network, just Google it or ask in #pulseaudio. And Wayland is a good thing for Linux, we'll finally have a desktop that doesn't tear or flicker like X does, removing that cruft called X is a good thing, and KDE gets it, that's why they are doing this. Just ask Aaron Seigo and the other KDE developers how they exposed bugs in X by developing Plasma or what a pain they had to suffer developing a next generation compositing environment and desktop shell in X.

Wayland will be able to use SPICE and RDP protocols for network transparency. Don't worry.

Re:Stupid

[Noughmad]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio.

If you still don't know how, there's a card I want you to turn in.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the whole point of the Wayland project that you'd require a "fancy graphics card" just to run a xterm / konsole / xfce terminal? Might not be able to make it past the animated 3-D video login screen without a $500 card.

No. Stop speaking in hyperbole.

Any integrated graphics from within the last 5 years is more than capable and a discrete card for around £25 will suffice for your 3D video login screen.

Re:Stupid

[Knuckles]

x11 in general - seems to work just fine.

Except that videos *still* show tearing with the proprietary nvidia drivers even if they are not being dragged around. (And yes, I have set the vsync option in nvidia-config).

Re:Stupid

[Kremmy]

Just like every other operating system - has there ever been an instance where changing screen resolution didn't effect the other running GUI applications? I certainly no stranger to having programs on Windows flip out because the screen settings changed suddenly. X is strict about it, avoiding the issues by not allowing such a silly thing to happen normally, but it's not like the others do it any better.

Re:Stupid

[isopropanol]

In X it's impossible to reliably change screen resolution without affecting windows of other applications.

In any raster display system it's impossible to reliably change screen resolution without affecting windows of other applications.

Re:Stupid

[visualight]

*possible* with the installation/configuration of additional software on an application by application basis vs. certain for every application without any additional software required.

Not even close to the same thing. It is dishonest to continuously imply that there is a comparison.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The X.Org folks are already working on moving in the same direction as Wayland, however. Keith Packard talks about it here:
X and the future of Linux Graphics

Re:Stupid

[MrHanky]

Wow, "5, insightful" for this drivel. Supporting Wayland doesn't mean ditching X11 or dropping it to secondary class support, at least not until most developers have switched to Wayland. Also, X.org runs on top of Wayland.

Re:Stupid

[JabberWokky]

Qt currently supports X and Wayland... although you have to restart the application currently to select a new render mode. It's not impossible that KDE will do the same.

Currently running unison-gtk over ssh -X to pick and choose files to move over on a headless server that's getting a massive harddrive upgrade. It has uses at times, but 99.something% of the time it would be nice to see the stack simplified. Especially if I can haul out the network options when needed.

Re:Stupid

[siride]

Do you think apps will communicate with Wayland with magic? They use the same mechanism of sockets that X uses, or shared memory/GL contexts/whatever for sending large data.

Re:Stupid

[spooky_d]

But X WAS re-written in the last 10 years. All the extensions actually circumvent the protocol, and try to take shortcuts. And it just doesn't work. It's bloated and it's painful to work with. Just add a new keyboard mapping to X, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

The X.org and XFree86 codebase is incredibly old. That means a lot of things, including the fact that it's incompatible with the way programmers think, work and expect things to behave this days. It is a steaming pile of s***, and tons of legacy code. Legacy bugs, that is, which are harder to fix because people are relying on them.

Newer code is not necessarily buggier. It can be smarter, better written, more sustainable. I doubt that having 16 extra years of experience makes you do stupider things.

Re:Stupid

[spooky_d]

That doesn't mean that Wayland CANNOT do it better :) And it's not the OS that is doing that, it's just the display drivers/servers.

Re:Stupid

[DrXym]

Go visit the Wayland site and look at its architecture. It's obvious how doing away with X will improve performance.

Re:Stupid

[Microlith]

As far as I can tell, anyone who's backing Wayland has no actual concrete complaints about X, they just feel the need to rewrite everything from scratch (a common problem, unfortunately). Furthermore, in all I've read about Wayland, it doesn't bring anything to the table except fewer features and newer (buggier) code.

I suppose that means that the guys behind Wayland, that is to say many of the people behind Xorg, have no valid or concrete complaints. Is it that they don't, you haven't looked, or you disagree with their complaints?

Re:Stupid

[Microlith]

wahhh, I want them to work for me on my pet project even if they're disinterested!

There has to be a stable alternative to the crazy shenanigans going on with Gnome, KDE, Wayland and Ubuntu folks.

Because, of course, rendering subsystems for which your entire counter-argument amounts to "fuck them, I don't want that!" has a whole lot in common with the many and varied criticisms of Gnome 3 and Unity.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

And they've been managing to piss off their users with all those fancy useless "features"

Re:Stupid

[JabberWokky]

Another greybeard here, been using *nix since before X existed (no, not before X11 existed... I'm talking about X).

Almost everything else has improved and gotten easier. Even things like vi are now all "walk you through" when you fire them up. And they just work.

X doesn't work on my MacBook Pro 13" 7,1 attached to an external monitor... the Nvidia driver doesn't work unless I drop in Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1" into the xorg.conf, and even then it doesn't do xrandr and has rendering peculiarities across two screens, and the open source driver, nouveau, doesn't even see the Mini DisplayPort at all. A choice of a black screen or an undetected screen unless I edit the X config. And I can repeat similar cases across various computers over the last decade... going back to when you *did* have to write your own X configuration files.

So, yeah... it hasn't exactly hit the "mature stage" yet, and that's with at least three massive overhauls/rewrites between four different organizations (MIT, Open Group, XFree86 and x.org). Maybe more... that's off the top of my head.

I'm using remote X right now (doing some work on a headless server I'm switching from 500GB to 7TB, and cleaning the cruft out of the filesystem along the way), but as far as I can see, Wayland is an orthogonal layer to X. It renders bitmaps, compositing them onto a display. Most GUI toolkits these days, including the big two, Gtk+ to Qt, tend to render to bitmaps and then just let X do what Wayland focuses on anyway. As a result, the performance gains of X over a network are disappearing in modern applications. There is no reason Wayland + remote protocol couldn't do about the same as X... if you're talking modern applications written with toolkits with fancy widgets.

And if you say "but I will use X appropriate applications", see the arguments elsewhere in this discussion about how *all* apps have to be network transparent, and having just some apps be especially written for network transparency is a losing proposition.

I love X as a system. When you get it working, it is awesome to be able to ssh -X and get your work done. I see my wife more often because she can get into her computing cluster at work and run her molecular dynamics software remotely and just let the cluster churn away, generating her data. I am using it right now to connect to a computer in my closet with no monitors attached.

That said, those *tasks* are why it is good... not X itself. If something else can do it, and do it better, then I'm happy to switch. If it can do it, and do it better for 99% of my tasks, I'm still happy.

Re:Stupid

[jakykong]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wayland doesn't claim to replace X -- at least not entirely. It's suggesting that X should be an add-on component, rather than the core process.
From the FAQ:

This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.

It sounds to me like X is supposed to be an optional component, to support legacy code and/or remote machines, etc. -- but isn't the only option. Wayland just takes over the one particular part of the process (just compositing on screen).
Admittedly, I haven't read a lot about wayland. Until this article, I'd never heard of it (perhaps showing how little I've kept up on tech news lately). But, out of genuine curiosity, how is this going to ruin the flexibility of X?

Re:Stupid

[isopropanol]

because any old janky computer has enough power to run apps locally.

Try a GIS program with a moderately large dataset (say the street, cadastral, and utilities maps for a city). Doesn't work useably fast on my Mac Mini (core2 duo, 2GB RAM, 500GB seagate momentus) but works like a charm remotely (X11 over Gigabit Ethernet) from my Phenom II x4 4GB RAM Linux box (using the same buildlevel of qGis on both machines).

Just because YOU only use office-type or web-browsing apps doesn't mean everyone does.

Re:Stupid

[mlwmohawk]

Wayland doesn't support network transparency the same way as eg. TCP/IP doesn't support encryption.

That is exactly right, and that's exactly what I've proposed. Augment X with extensions to provide the things that are missing. Don't trash it all and re-write a new interface. The lost value in losing X is immeasurable.

TCP/IP does not support encryption. It wasn't intended too. X doesn't support audio/video. It wasn't intended too. SSL provides encryption on top of TCP/IP. They didn't re-write the whole networking layer just for encryption. Why should they re-write the display layer for audio/video?

Re:Stupid

[StormReaver]

P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.

X will survive as a plugin to Wayland, or as a separate server that runs on top of Wayland just like it runs on top of Windows. It just won't be an integral part of the graphics pipeline as it currently is.

So there's no need to worry about running X applications remotely.

Re:Stupid

[Urkki]

X11 has enormous amount of crud, legacy code that must be there or it's not X11, yet is seldom used by anything. Also at least some people seem to disagree with how X.org is developing their server. Both forking X.org or rewriting the server from scratch would be unnecessarily huge tasks due to all the things that X11 includes.

Sometimes it's better to just start from scratch.

Now I haven't looked into Wayland carefully enough to have an opinion about how good an effort Wayland is, considering it's starting from scratch.

But one thing very hard to bolt onto X11 is getting a steady 60 fps frame rate with synced sounds. I think this will be much easier with Wayland.

Re:Stupid

[drinkypoo]

This is why we have mapserver, which spews out SVG, or PNG, or whatever, so that only the interface has to run on your client computer. If you really must run the browser remotely then so be it.

Re:Stupid

[styrotech]

Just like every other operating system - has there ever been an instance where changing screen resolution didn't effect the other running GUI applications?

In the context of starting full screen apps (ie the context of this thread), the Amiga could do that comfortably 25 yrs ago.

You could even drag down the full screen app running at one resolution to see the GUI desktop running at another resolution behind it.

Of course with todays display hardware and composited desktops etc, that is probably a much harder thing to do with no real benefit. A lot of what the Amiga did was direct hardware hacks.

Re:Stupid

[martin-boundary]

Why paint yourself into a corner? Focusing on local X is trying to be more like Windows, just at a time when there's an industry shift away from monolithic PCs on destkops starting to happen. Windows is dying. It only has 10 years left.

Linux has a chance of becoming the cloud computing OS, but that ain't going to happen if we insist that every computer is like a PC, with a keyboard, mouse, and CRT/LCD.

Re:Stupid

[man_of_mr_e]

If you're referring to tablets popularity, then the "cloud" is largely irrelevent.. The user experience is still local. The apps still run local. The only thing in the cloud is service and storage.

Local app execution will always be the preferred way to run apps, even if all the guts run in the cloud. The actual rendering of the apps will still be local.

Re:Stupid

[anss123]

Of course with todays display hardware and composited desktops etc, that is probably a much harder thing to do with no real benefit. A lot of what the Amiga did was direct hardware hacks.

The Amiga's multiple resolution trick did not change the scanrate of the signal going to the monitor. In effect that meant the monitor never truly changed resolution. You can do that on today's hardware too, no need for any hacking (as Amiga emulators can demonstrate).

The limitation of this technique is that the lower resolution has to fit perfectly within the higher resolution, i.e on rez is 640x400 and the other 320x200, so it's not terribly useful. An app that needs it can simply double the pixels it draws, there's no need for OS support.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I have seen video of Keith Packard's talk which was providing quite a lot of reasons why Wayland or something similar is the way to go forward...

So somebody that has not even heard of the root window is trying to tell us all what X can or can't do and getting it wrong?

I'm pretty sure Keith Packard, as a lead of X.org, has heard of the root window.

Epic. Thank you /. for this stuff! :D

Re:Stupid

[suy]

By far the most common complaint I see about X is "OMG IT'S SLOW BECAUSE IT ALWAYS RUNS OVER THE NETWORK!!!!!!!!". (...) As far as I can tell, anyone who's backing Wayland has no actual concrete complaints about X, they just feel the need to rewrite everything from scratch

Have you bothered to read the article about Wayland's architecture? The problem with X11 is not the network transparency or the fact that it is not invented by the author. The problem, AIUI, is that the X server has to interchange lots of information with the compositor because each handle pieces of the information that should not be split. If a click happens, the server handles it, but the compositor can modify the aspect of a window, so the server requires information from the compositor too. Wayland fixes this merging the server and the compositor. This has nothing to do with the network transparency.

Re:Stupid

[simcop2387]

X11 may be network transparent, but the problem is that the large amount of the extensions that have been bolted on to it in the past 20 years are not really network transparent. many of them internally use shared memory and other tricks that cause them to either not work at all, nvidia's glx implementation was[is?] horrible about this in the past.

Now let me ask you something, why can this not be done after the fact? You seem to be misunderstanding that X11 and Wayland are trying to solve the same things, in the case of Wayland what's being done is not the same thing as X11. Wayland is being designed so that the clients are free to build their display in any method they want: X11!, OpenGL, VNC, RDP, NX, Direct3D [the linux open source drivers will do some of 10/11 if support is compiled in], etc. They then tell Wayland where it is to display it, currently i believe either from shared memory or from an opengl texture or something like that. That's all wayland is doing, that's all it's intended to do. There's already a port of Xorg to it to display existing applications, and even work being done to give it network transparency in the correct way. This is by doing the rendering on the remote side on a non-displaying wayland server (which is the way it's being done these days 90% of the time on X11 already) and then transferring that using the "damage" information to send only the changes. This will allow a much nicer way to do both accelerated 3d and 2d operations over a remote link than is usually possible with X11 (again due to the way the binary blobs handle things, nvidia uses a device in /dev to send commands to the card rather than doing it through the X server a lot of times, to get better performance), this prevents it from working very well over a network with some drivers. This would also remove the need to send all the textures, vertex buffer objects, polygons and everything over the remote link to be able to even draw the screen.

Now this also isn't the ONLY way to do it either, because wayland isn't trying to solve this problem and is instead leaving it to others to work on you could even still do this like X11 is doing and send it as commands over the wire, or render it in CPU on the remote side, mesa's new architecture makes this far easier than it has in the past to do all of this stuff.

Now I will admit that I can understand that some of this stuff should have likely been fixed up in Xorg/X11 already (or in a new revision of X altogether), but the thing is, nobody has. It's been a problem for years now and all anybody has done is bolt on partly supported extensions (go look at the state of XRENDER support in all the drivers, it's atrocious. And also the stuff between EXA and XAA doing the same thing but different, but one being newer and theoretically a nicer interface but not being supported very well in some drivers.) and moving things out of the X server into client-space because it seems to be simpler to solve the problem there. One of the reasons that Cairo exists is to make any of the drawing operations transparent to the client regardless of what extensions are supported on the X server. Due to the fact that an extension can't be guaranteed to be supported you need to be able to fall back to some other method for drawing when faced with not having the extension you need. Otherwise this means that you can't run which might be acceptable for some specific application, but for something like a toolkit: Qt, Tk, Gtk, Wx, etc. it's not a good idea to just not work. The thing is, as stated before, nobody has taken the time to move any of this into the X servers, either Xorg, Apple (though i'm not sure they care too much about X11 more than a compatibility layer), *BSD, or anybody else with a stake in things working well on X11.

So what would you do in a new version of X? I would expect you'd drop support for the stuff that's not being used anymore: the fully synchronous calls (already being done to X11 have a look at XCB), the old style font renderi

Re:Stupid

[martin-boundary]

No, I'm not talking about tablets. I'm talking about running apps directly on some nameless box possibly in a different city, with one person controlling the app using the fridge touchscreen in their hotel room, while projecting the output of said app onto a conference screen which is located in a different building, during a presentation by the person's boss.

The point is that the app running on the nameless box should be able to write its data to the conference screen without special output drivers, and read its input from a mobile phone without special input drivers or conversion kludges. Both input and output should be network transparent. In fact, the app might have been written in say 1995 and it should be able to do all that in say 2020 without any change to its source code in the meantime, ideally.

Making this kind of vision work is still a challenge. It requires security models, input/output abstractions, protocols, etc. I'm saying that's a much bigger prize than doubling the framerate on the next generation of GPUs. Better local integration with the integrated graphics on the next Intel chips is great, but only if it doesn't make the other stuff conceptually harder.

Re:Stupid

[Coryoth]

Okay, if this is the case, why is Wayland ignoring network transparency? Fine, the X rendering layer isn't used anymore and should go away; maybe the entirety of X should go away; why does it immediately follow that network transparency should go away? Don't throw out the baby with the bath water.

I don't think that's what they've done. From what I've read Wayland is simply not bothering to implement the network transparency -- the framework allows for it, and supports using X to do it, and could presumably have a different network only plugin to do the same or similar.

Re:Stupid

[gr8_phk]

P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely

There has been talk of remoting Wayland. Sure the network bandwidth required will be higher than remote X but this isn't 1980.

Re:Stupid

[smash]

Apple have remote admin tools. However as it is based on PDF drawing commands you could even display it on a printer and snail mail it if you like.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

X is only any good because of extensions that replace large chunks of it. Visuals have no concept of transparency, that's an extension. Resizing a display, that's an extension. Fonts that aren't black and white bitmaps ... extension. And the list goes on and on.

X doesn't need to be replaced, but the parts that aren't used anymore need to be updated with their extension equivalents. Call it, I dunno, X12?

Re:Stupid

[tzanger]

I am in love with NoMachine NX; it's remote X11 done right. The free version is more than sufficient for my needs, and there's FreeNX too if you care about running OSS-only.

Re:Stupid

[tzanger]

The point is, 9x% of users use X locally now. Focus on that, and when that is good, then you can turn to network transparency. And you know what? That would allow them to focus the attention on network transparency it deserves, rather than shoehorning it in as an all of nothing proposition.

The problem with that is that when you decide to "turn on" network transparency you find it breaks everything because people haven't written Wayland nor the apps running Wayland to work properly with a network. Then you end up with disgusting hacks like RDP and VNC. I've used both and neither can hold a candle to "ssh -CX appname" let alone something a hundred times better like NoMachine NX.

No, network transparency has to be part of the system from the very get-go, or just don't bother mentioning it. You can't build in a feature like that at a later date.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

> They are clearly in not-invented-here syndrome.

Keith Packard is the current lead of Xorg and was one of the original authors of X. Now what were you babbling about?

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still a nasty lossy vnc-style hack compared to lossless X11, at least when I last checked. X11 isn't perfect, but RDP is a joke compared to it for such purposes.

Re:Stupid

[dave87656]

Thanks for the Link. Very interesting.

So somebody that has not even heard of the root window is trying to tell us all what X can or can't do and getting it wrong?

I'm pretty sure Keith Packard, as a lead of X.org, has heard of the root window.

Here is the video I was referring to: X and the future of Linux Graphics.

Re:Stupid

[SanityInAnarchy]

While it is nice to have the ability to do this without application support, the better approach when this is a design goal of that particular application is to implement client/server for that application.

Suppose, for example, that the application has some vector graphics to display. With the X model, either we need to teach the X server to deal with vector graphics, and support all the things our application needs, or the application is going to draw to a local buffer and send a raw image to the display. This is what most applications do, which works fine locally, but sucks over a network -- you're sending a raw bitmap with every update -- which is why I believe VNC has options for lossily compressing the video.

And then maybe you want to animate it a bit. Now we need to teach our application -- and, potentially, X -- to morph our vectors around in clever ways. And imagine if our app decided to draw its own bitmaps again, which means we now need the X protocol to support efficiently streaming live video just to run our application. Every app now has the same bandwidth requirements as, say, OnLive.

Support for things like OpenGL is hardly a solution. What, should we send raw triangles over the network? Video cards are what drove the upgrade from PCI to AGP to PCI Express because they need that much bandwidth!

But of course, vector graphics are tiny. Even the program to manipulate them isn't that big, and it can be cached, or installed locally.

It seems to me that the only way to do this right is to allow people to run local code. If you don't trust them, run it in a sandbox. We have a platform that's trying to do this, actually -- the Web -- though, of course, I'm sure a dozen people will immediately point out a dozen things a local app can do slightly better now.

And if you're going to run the Web, or just plain local code, you're going to need some sort of local display to run it on. You could use X for that, but then we're back to this silly situation where the network transparency of X is useless.

Of course, this requires apps to be developed either for the Web or for your particular tablet platform. Then again, if your application was written in 1995, chances are, you can run it in the tablet in 2020, or at least over a less-efficient protocol like RDP or VNC. It's also not clear that an app written in 1995 with the assumption of a keyboard and mouse is going to be useful in 2020 without at least some updates to support input devices.

I would love if network transparency could stay. If Wayland ends up with network transparency, or if Xorg wins (and eliminates the problems that inspired Wayland in the first place), I will be ecstatic. It just doesn't seem likely.

Re:Stupid

[quantumphaze]

Another memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.

I like how Alt+Tab doesn't work in most native fullscreen games on Linux but usually fine in Wine. I don't know if it's X11s fault or the window manager for letting any window shit over global keyboard shortcuts.

If the game is buggy and locks up, I have to go to the tty to kill it there. Then back at X I can only hope that the mouse and keyboard input still works (eDuke32 on Ubuntu 7.10). There was one port of Quake I tried a while back (2008) that wouldn't let me out of it unless I quit it. I think I had to use SysRq+R to even let it get me to the tty.

Re:Stupid

[ProfessionalCookie]

Here's what X can do today that we will lose: Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another. This is not the same as VNC or terminal services.

You know that OS X 10.7 does that now for native non-X applications.

I'm pretty sure people are just saying that for 90+ percent of users X is displayed locally. I'm pretty sure that there's a good way to create X's features on top of Wayland. But I have to agree that improving local display is a good priority. Then those of us who need GUI application display over the network can work on that– I'm pretty sure it's not impossible.

Re:Stupid

[ProfessionalCookie]

Also, keeping X is just part of a widespread movement to . . . keep X.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

> That again is a matter of correct programming

No, it's not.
You can't do anything without tiring on X.
I still have to find a window manager on which you could resize a window without it looking awful.

Re:Stupid

[yk4ever]

"Huge systems with many virtual machines"? Mainframes are dead, dude. Modern "cloud" computing is all about web UI, and it doesn't need no X server.

I, myself, used remote X rendering one. Not very easy to understand and setup, that one. VNC's much more straightforward (and can reliably work over longer distances too).

Linux still wants to conquer the desktop. Note that the two leading user-oriented Unices out there (OS X/iOs and Android) have both abandoned X. Because X just limits the user experience smoothness, that's a known fact.

Re:Stupid

[visualight]

Please read my post.

VNC, RDP, NX and the other remote desktop protocols are not satisfactory replacement for network transparency. Since 30 people say it every time this comes up:

VNC, RDP, NX and the other remote desktop protocols are not satisfactory replacement for network transparency.

VNC, RDP, NX and the other remote desktop protocols are not satisfactory replacement for network transparency.

If the cost of any new features fromm Wayland (so far, zero) is network transparency, it's too expensive. DO NOT WANT.

Re:Stupid

[bjourne]

You are wrong. Maintaining the unused stuff takes a ton of effort which is proportional to the amount of stuff there is. Additionally, for each new component you add, you have to check with each of the unused ones if any weird interactions causes any of them to break. Maintaining software is just as expensive as developing new one.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH, there are things that it will fix. For example, it's finally just about becoming limiting that window dimensions have to fit in 16 bits. And it will also mean that some legacy nastiness can be dropped. (I so wish I'd never had to understand the mess that is visuals. Complex, confusing and long obsolete.)

Then X12 should be released, that will extend to 32 bits, support only one visual and legacy nastiness will be designated obsolete and/or dropped with appropriate safeguards.

In computers progressive, incremental change is almost always superior to big bang change.

Re:Stupid

[m50d]

RDP is cumbersome if you're using more than one remote machine at a time. Heck, it's cumbersome if you're using a remote machine and your local machine at the same time. That might not be your use case, but I assure you it's very much real-world.

Re:Stupid

[morgauxo]

Wayland is the best motivation I have seen for becoming an active developer of X11 applications yet. I hope that the developers that made Linux great will stick with X and the new kids can fork the desktop until they realize they are just wasting their time re-implementing OSX.

Re:Stupid

[mlwmohawk]

Mainframes are dead, dude. Modern "cloud" computing is all about web UI, and it doesn't need no X server.

Well, the clock speed of processors are reaching limitations of current technology. The CPU vendors are adding more and more CPU cores. And people have called me ignorant for my post. Wow.

I, myself, used remote X rendering one. Not very easy to understand and setup, that one. VNC's much more straightforward (and can reliably work over longer distances too).

Yea, I use VNC sometimes and it SUCKS. It is slow even on a local machine. Create a virtual machine using QEMU and try to use the console. This is VNC. Next, either SSH or expose the X11 ports, and run an application. It is totally usable. This is the future we should be preparing for it instead of ignoring it.

Re:Stupid

[sgt scrub]

No your correct. It is still a worthless heap of shit.

Re:Stupid

[sgt scrub]

Open a single application on a remote machine with RDP (not a whole desktop just one application), cut content, then paste it into an application running via RDP on a third machine. You cant even do the first part with RDP. If someone walked up to my computer while I was away, assuming I was stupid enough not to lock it, they would think I had two instances of Code::Blocks up on my machine. There is no way of knowing they are opened from two remote machines. There is no performance lag, no restrictions on moving data around, with the exception of doing a ps and lsof -i it is undetectable. That is Xnest. Now for Xming. I've had the misfortune of being stuck on a windows machine on several occasions. The first thing I do is start an Xming session back to my desktop. Then I start an ssh tunnel session and a samba session from my desktop back to the POS I'm stuck working on so I can transfer data back and forth. I've actually had people ask me "what did you do to that machine" because they didn't realize I had my desktop up full screen. With RDP you get tearing and lag and shit pixelization.

Re:Stupid

[siride]

Based on watching the commits that roll in to the X server, they aren't spending very much time on it at all.

Re:Stupid

[KugelKurt]

This is a mistake!

It is a mistake that KWin will be developed to support Wayland in addition to Xorg? WTF is wrong with you? All the main developer does it to support plugable back-ends. That's all.

Re:Stupid

[dbIII]

So you want me to watch a 39 minute video (which can not possibly include Keith Packard saying what you've written because he didn't make your stupid mistake and forget about the root window) to back up that crap you made up about full screen video (which I read when I was playing a full screen game on one X server)?
Nice link which I will watch later but it's a very dishonest namedropping and misattribution tactic that you should be extremely ashamed of and really should not care enough to descend to such depths in a forum like this.

Re:Stupid

[simcop2387]

Please read mine. I answered your concerns there already. Your concerns about network transparency are fear mongering because you are not actually looking at alternatives. RDP/NX on a single window does exactly the same thing as X11 forwarding, with the possibility of even moving the windows from one display session to another, or even sharing it on multiple sessions at once. As far as nesting goes, wayland already supports it, and has since last year. The features it's added are better ram usage, better hardware accelerated drawing (Yes this is a FEATURE, it isn't used ONLY for wobbly windows and other inane shit like that, it's also used for fonts, scrolling, and all the other stuff that 100% of users in ALL cases do [only exception might be someone ONLY playing videos or other recorded media]).

X11 does not actually do network transparency very well at all due to it's synchronous nature and this cannot be changed without removing backwards compatibility from the protocol. RDP/NX on a single window does do EVERYTHING that X11 over network does, and more. For example, using lossy compression for low bandwidth links to get the larger picture and then sending changes without such compression, lower latency input (since there isn't multiple back and forths acknowledging the input), the ability to detach the window without closing the application, the ability to RECONNECT to an application that's already running, the ability to move an application from one machine to another without closing and reopening it.

How does X11 solve any of those things? It doesn't. It never tried to, it was never intended to. But people do need to do this in some environments, that's why things like RDP and NX were created, and they can and do solve the exact same thing that X11 network transparency provides.

No where in these discussions have you even tried to answer the question of "What does X11 do that NX/RDP doesn't?" If you're only issue is that ssh -X or ssh -Y doesn't work with wayland then you need to actually consider that you're not really concerned with network transparency but just ssh supporting forwarding of the display which is still possible to do, it just hasn't been done YET. And if that's the only issue, then you need to stop spreading FUD about others projects when you're just upset that they aren't mature yet.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

NOT FUD.

x11 network transparency is always there for every application. I can COUNT on it. I DON'T have to install or configure anything. I can log in to a remote system and KNOW it's there. For EVERY application.

I know you understand this, I know you have always realized that this is the point. Stop pretending you don't.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point I am ending this discussion because I've addressed this twice already and you are not reading. I have specifically talked about how this can and will be available from projects that are being discussed.

from wayland itself: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

It is also possible to put a remoting protocol into a wayland compositor, either a standalone remoting compositor or as a part of a full desktop compositor. This will let us forward native Wayland applications. The standalone compositor could let you log into a server and run an application back on your desktop. Building the fowarding into the desktop compositor, could let you export or share a window on the fly with a remote wayland compositor, for example a friends desktop.

THIS IS 100% WHAT YOU ARE ASKING TO BE ABLE TO DO? WHY DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?

You're talking like Wayland has already killed Xorg when wayland hasn't even had a stable release yet because it is not ready.

Re:Stupid

[Eric Green]

I've been using "X" since before modern Windows or Mac OS X existed. My first experience with "X" was on a Sun 4 workstation, running olwm on SunOS. One thing that has been true for every year since I started using "X": The end user experience is terrible. Awful. No application looks like any other application or works the same as any other application, simple things like, e.g., cut and paste, simply don't work the way any sensible end user would expect, and the configuration of the system has been a Deep Dark Dreary Dismal Swamp for the entirety of "X"'s existence. Then when more complete desktop environments like Gnome arrived, they learned altogether all the wrong lessons. Gnome 2 reminded me of Windows 95 if the Soviet Union had not fallen and had decided to clone Windows. You could almost hear the poorly-ground gears gnashing along and the clank of poorly fitting mechanical parts. The whole 'gconf' system, for example, was a dreary re-implementation of the Windows registry which did not even bring with it the redeeming value of replacing all those individual system configuration files that make it impossible to replicate the equivalent of Windows "restore points" for backing out of failed configuration changes. All Gnome 2 managed to do was add yet another layer of mess to the muddled mess that is the Linux user experience. (I'm still reserving judgement on Gnome 3, which appears to be an attempt at cloning Mac OS Lion's UI, but behind the scenes it still clanks).

The only time Unix has *ever* managed to get significant end-user client/desktop share managed to do so only by completely abandoning "X". Look at Android. Do you see "X" anywhere there? Exactly. Look at Mac OS X. Yes, you can run "X" there, but only via a compatibility layer which is deliberately ugly compared to the native UI. Why did these people abandon "X" and go to something different? Once you can answer that question, then, and only then, are you qualified to say "X is the bestest windowing system, like, EVAH!" Until then, you're just blowing hot air.

Finally, regarding network transparency and "X": Uhm, have you used Microsoft's RDP recently? It makes any network transparency you get from "X" look sad and dated. Even the *sound* from the remote end comes out on your local desktop! And if you want to share files between your local desktop and the remote system you're logged into, just set up file sharing in your RDP session, and presto, it pops out on the other end as a network share automatically when you log in to the remote end. And your desktop resizes itself to your *LOCAL* screen size, instead of being hard-wired to the *REMOTE* screen size like with VNC. And the performance is a quantum leap over the sad pathetic laggy excuse for VNC that is Vino on Gnome. Anybody who claims network transparency as an advantage of "X" hasn't used a modern RDP client to a modern Windows system. What people want is to access their desktop whether they're local or remote. RDP is currently the best way of doing that on the planet, period. Any advantage "X" ever had in this area was in the 20th century. Given that, why bother with all the overhead and mess of "X"? Why not just take some popular GUI library and make that talk directly to hardware (or to a remote display like RDP) via a light abstraction layer? We could call it something novel, like, say, "Mac OS X". And I'm sure it'd sell like hotcakes.

Re:Stupid

[Eric Green]

Don't be so sure that network bandwidth required will be higher than remote X. Displaying a window refresh is displaying a window refresh, in the end -- the number of bytes required to do so has a fixed minimum (i.e., the difference between the old window contents and the new window contents) which doesn't require a "network transparent" protocol to encapsulate, just requires that *something* capture the fact that a certain area has changed and send only that certain area's changes to the remote end. RDP does this quite well, at least as efficiently as "X" does it, and there's no reason to suppose that Wayland could not do it equally well if Wayland's designers put the proper hooks in for a network transparency layer to intercept change events.

Re:Stupid

[yourmommycalled]

Yes keep going exactly how is Wayland an improvement? The answer is it isn't. All it does is encourage the lame-assed linux "developers" to continue down the path of eyecandy rather than useability, flexibility and conservation of resources.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

Where do you see the word "eye candy" in the line below?

"His stated goal was a system in which "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.""

This has NOTHING to do with eye candy, it's all about rendering graphics correctly in Linux, it's about eliminating flicker/redrawing issues like the ones I have with X right now.

How is eliminating flicker/lag/tearing not an improvement?

It is precisely for this kind of attitude that Linux sucks today on the desktop and one of the reasons why the average person doesn't want to use it, because of instead of embracing progress we complain at the people who wants to enhance things. How about being less close-minded?

Re:Stupid

[martin-boundary]

the better approach when this is a design goal of that particular application is to implement client/server for that application.

I have to strongly disagree. It's not that there's anything wrong with apps being engineered around unique design goals, but it just doesn't scale economically.

You're talking here about a world in theory where people can't do the things they might want unless a software developer makes it happen first. Or viewed backwards, every combination of things that people do with computers will require some developer doing some work: That limits the total number of different things that people can do with their computers to only a multiple of the number of programmers on earth. That's a pretty small limit viewed this way, no?

The design goal for infrastructure software should be (imho) to make things possible without extra coding. From this point of view, a special client/server design is not superior to a higher level of abstraction, it's just more efficient for that one case.

But the thing is, we can't really know how people might want to combine apps and hardware resources if given the chance. The LCD with an impatient person waiting for a screen refresh today might turn out to be a robot or script tomorrow. And if an app needs just a bit of rewrite to work efficiently over the network, maybe it won't be used at all because there's no programmer to do the work, or it would take too long to implement, etc.

In ten years or so, we've already gone from dialup speeds to fast pipes that allow streaming HD. That's equivalent to sending a fully drawn pixmap several times per second (with compression). And it's utterly crazy, people should be watching movies locally - download a file, run a local player - exactly the use case you're arguing in general. And you're wrong, because people watch streaming video anyway. It's stupid, but there it is. I'm as much surprised as you.

Re:Stupid

[SanityInAnarchy]

You're talking here about a world in theory where people can't do the things they might want unless a software developer makes it happen first.

That is by definition true, often more than one. Software developers wrote X, for one thing. I'm not sure what your point here is, though.

The design goal for infrastructure software should be (imho) to make things possible without extra coding. From this point of view, a special client/server design is not superior to a higher level of abstraction, it's just more efficient for that one case.

Your italics almost make that look like a dirty word...

A certain amount of efficiency is needed as a baseline, first of all. The use case you describe, where I'm running an app on a nameless box in a different city, is not something I can ever see scaling well with something like VNC or OnLive -- that is, with a truly generic model where we just capture the app's output and stream that as video over the network.

Yet from what I understand, that's how most modern apps work when X is used as a backend. They draw pixmaps and send them to the server. Works great locally, falls over completely in the "nameless server in another city" use case.

We could conceivably add enough to X so that things like Cairo will work efficiently over the network, but that only works so long as people actually use those libraries. Sooner or later, someone will try something interesting which isn't supported directly by our higher-level GUI abstractions, which means we're back to sending either pixmaps or GL triangles across the network, which doesn't scale.

Some apps use X efficiently enough now that they work well remotely, and that's fine. Most apps don't generate enough traffic or require enough performance for it to be a problem over a LAN, and that's fine, though these apps would work equally well under VNC -- all X buys them here is easy ssh-forwarding and rootlessness. I love ssh and rootless remote windows, but I can't see that being a make-or-break feature compared to, say, local video performance.

But the thing is, we can't really know how people might want to combine apps and hardware resources if given the chance. The LCD with an impatient person waiting for a screen refresh today might turn out to be a robot or script tomorrow. And if an app needs just a bit of rewrite to work efficiently over the network...

This is why I tend to suggest that most apps should be written for the Web. It enables everything we are talking about:

• Enough local code that you can do new stuff efficiently -- if SVG isn't good enough, you can roll your own with Canvas.
• Unless you go out of your way to be difficult, this pretty much implies a remote API, which means bots and scripts are easy.
• Cross-platform and likely to work far into the future -- in 2020, barring websites developed for IE6+ActiveX, you'll probably be able to open websites from 1995 on whatever device you want.
• Client/server, without any developer effort other than using the Web in the first place. I might develop a web UI to use locally and then trivially deploy it over a LAN.
• Lets users combine stuff in unexpected ways. Userscripts (Greasemonkey), extensions, apps which connect to yours via its implicit API, bookmarks, tabs, a back button... Tons of stuff you get almost for free.

Downsides right now are that it's less convenient to use than, say, GTK+ or Qt -- but those have X11 backends, and I bet HTML is much more convenient than raw X11. Aside from the tooling issue, this is something you can use right now, without having to fix X11 first (or buy dedicated fiber lines to every presentation room).

In ten years or so, we've already gone from dialup speeds to fast pipes that allow streaming HD. That's equivalent to sending a fully drawn pixmap several times per second (with compression).

Re:Stupid

[yourmommycalled]

Are you running KDE? Are you using compiz? Are you using an implementation of X11 that follows the API? Are you running linux. If you answered yes to any of the preceding there lies your problem not X11. The problem doesn't lay with X11 it lays with the poorly written linux graphics card drivers and an even more poor X11 implementation. If I can run X11 without flickering/redrawing issues on a Sun 3/50. or an g4 based Mac-mini or a pentium-4 with an ATI-Rage card running FreeBSD or Solaris maybe it's time for you look into why your vaunted linux is doing so poorly. Try removing some of the dead code in the linux graphic card drivers. Every time I compare a linux driver to a Solaris/BSD driver for the same card I wonder how the linux driver even compiles It isn't an issue of embracing progress, moving from the original unix V7 filesystem to the Berkley FFS to Sun ZFS is progress, moving from manual parallelization to autoparallelization is progress, moving from a CLI to windowing based systems is progress, all the extra eyecandy that was add in Gnome3/KDE4 is not progress, it a bunch of wankers trying to outdo each other with special effects.

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Wayland compatible with Unity?

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

You know you can turn off these desktop effects if you don't like, at least in KDE4 (kwin), and still have a double buffered desktop right?

Seriously, trolling much?

Re:Stupid

[yourmommycalled]

No trolling: just tired of "power users" talking about how much they "know". Let's try this again. You say "it's about eliminating flicker/redrawing issues like the ones I have with X right now." My claim it isn't a problem with X11 it is as you correctly state "it's all about rendering graphics correctly in Linux" The problem you claim you want fix with wayland isn't a problem with X11 but a problem with linux. AS YOU YOURSELF SAY. Fix linux in particular the device drivers and the problems go away. Once again the flickering/redrawing issues don't occur with AIX/HPUX/Solaris/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/OS-X, just linux

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget the X11 version of the apps you use once they switch to Wayland, yes, I think that is a totally practical thing to do.

Re:Stupid

[diego.viola]

I'm not saying that Linux is at fault here. Nevertheless I apologize for the way I expressed myself before. All I'm trying to say is that I hope the situation improves with Wayland or with new drivers, whatever the solution might be, I believe we need to embrace developments like Wayland instead of bashing them. I know network transparency is an important thing and still used today but we need to learn to work together towards a solution and improve things.

All the best.

Re:Stupid

[man_of_mr_e]

You didn't actually read my link, did you?

Yes, you can do everything you said with RemoteApp. It looks like two instance of the app open on your local desktop.

Re:Stupid

[man_of_mr_e]

You're confusing designing it for network transparency versus implementing it with network transparency. You can do the latter if you've done the former.

You seem to think nobody is even considering it. That's certainly not true.

Re:Stupid

[tzanger]

You seem to think nobody is even considering it. That's certainly not true.

I'm just really concerned that the decision to "design in network transparency" will be what is said, but when everyone's salivating over how cool and fast and slick it's going to be that design decision will be marginalized. I'd love to get some kind of involvement in Wayland but I know that I haven't even the slightest amount of time to be useful in such a project.

I guess that's why I'm posting really concerned comments on a random web forum. :-/

Re:Stupid

[A Jew]

What's motivating Wayland-adoption is, I believe, a desire not for fancy animations and useless effects, but for smoother graphics. Nowadays there are all kinds of glitches and other imperfections. Also, Wayland is supposed to make the process of drawing graphics on the screen more efficient somehow and simplify the graphics stack or stuff like that.

Re:Stupid

[A Jew]

P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.

Wayland should be able to support remote applications, it just probably won't use the X11 protocol. I've read that some of the possibilities for remote applications in Wayland are more efficient than the X11 protocol (though that doesn't mean they can't be used with X).

Re:Stupid

[badkarmadayaccount]

blip.tv Keith Packard X11 Wayland presentation @ linux.conf.au 2011 (Brisbane)See the presentation, then talk.

Re:Stupid

[badkarmadayaccount]

Actually the guys at the IETF are thinking of extending TCP with transparent encryption, independent of the application, because SSL is quite the headache at times.

Re:Stupid

[badkarmadayaccount]

OK. Use RDP.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What's wrong with X11?

[teaserX]

Serious question. TFA mentions that Wayland has advantages on mobile devices but does that make "Farewell X" a foregone conclusion? Is it really necessary to run the same display server on your phone and your desktop?

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Beetjebrak]

It could be nice to run a huge CPU and RAM hog on your PC at home and have just the display on your mobile.. I could see a use case in that.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[vlm]

It could be nice to run a huge CPU and RAM hog on your PC at home and have just the display on your mobile.. I could see a use case in that.

VNC?

Its not a two way race, but at least a three way race.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[equex]

It funny that now that everyone has a minimum 50 inch HD TV and a 27 inch HD computer screen, it suddenly important to save screen estate everywhere. (Also referring to Gnome3, the latest Firefox changes etc..) so it can be run on a phone as well. Its crazy.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

X11 uses as much or as little memory and CPU as you will give it. Given that people were using it on 10 MHz desktop workstations with a few megabytes of RAM in the past, it clearly scales down. And even today, it uses a fraction of the resources that OS X uses for similar graphics.

So, I doubt Wayland is going to do any better on mobile devices than X11.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[SRChiP]

So, you can have a very powerful mobile phone that is backed by a dedicated server. Yep, it will make very small devices with incredible processing power, in a weird way.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest problem with X11 is that it's licensed under a non-free non-GPL license. For Linux to be a truly free operating system it cannot rely on a display system which fundamentally does not respect users freedom.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Chemisor]

The main problem with X11 is the complete lack of frame boundaries. Applications just send a stream of drawing commands with no indication of where one frame stops and the next one begins. Consequently the server has to keep drawing stuff as it comes in, resulting in flicker. Flicker is the first thing a novice X11 programmer complains about and online forums have been filled with pleas for help with this problem for decades. The traditional solution was to render to an offscreen image and send it to the server. This requires a lot of bandwidth, so the next step is to use MIT-SHM extension to avoid this traffic. Then came XComposite extension which automatically handles double buffering. XComposite has the luxury of being able to sync to vretrace, but not knowing where the frame boundaries are it can't do it lest it cut the instruction stream in the wrong place and draw half-a-screen. In the meantime, after two decades of deliberation, the XSync extension still does not implement the ability to detect vretrace.

Wayland solves the above by moving rendering into the client, as in the render-to-image solution above, and then copying the image to the server. This can be done though shared memory as well. The rendered image on the client represents the complete frame.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[vlm]

everyone has a minimum 50 inch HD TV and a 27 inch HD computer screen

Means you can't signal importance / wealth / conspicuous consumption on a big screen. You signal by owning expensive little screens now.

Back when 50 inch TVs cost more than a used car, I couldn't afford one so I didn't care. Now that they give them away with the purchase of a bag of pork rinds at walmart, it would be uncool for me to be seen buying one. There was a momentary sweet spot a couple years ago where they were cheap, but not yet ghetto, but I missed it. So believe it or not, my "daily viewer" is a 80s era magnavox CRT that just won't quit working. If only it was engineered like a modern TV to burn out in a year or two, then I could toss it and buy a giant disposable TV, but it just won't quit working...

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[calmofthestorm]

Not at all. Thanks to advances in saving screen space and window management, I am perfectly happy with a 1280x800 laptop for everyday use, development, etc. For those who insist on mobility it's nice to obsolete the giant monitor.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply put? The Xorg guys. While supporting the latest hardware is fun and all (and would be useful if it actually worked) the support for the older gear has gone down the drain. As in, they're now on what, the third "acceleration architecture" and all that ever does is make the overall thing more complex and sluggish. And then there's the complete lack of documentation. No, lists of available api calls in five different formats (thank you doxygen) without serious explanation of what any of it does nevermind how it fits together, is just not enough. Yet that's all there is, if it's there. Plenty of parts aren't even documented at all. And then there's the newly revamped build system that puts the dependencies arse-backward and causes "pure" C libraries to suddenly depend on python and/or perl, hardware drivers to depend on dbus, and so on, and so forth. In short, the whole mess has become somewhat unwieldy and the best the peeps know how to "fix" that is more of the same only starting over from scratch, and dropping all the useful features while at it. Syeah that'll work. For some purposes it's faster, cleaner, and more performant to revive that sack of dead code named XFree86. That's how well the Xorg guys are doing.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[starofale]

Just because you're willing to spend money on a 27 inch HD computer screen doesn't mean everyone is.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[macraig]

This makes me cackle, because this was exactly the sort of thing we were doing with DESQview/X back in the early 90s. It was an X server WITH multitasking for DOS, and of course it worked both ways, meaning you could:

- run X11 apps on a UNIX machine and interact with them from a DOS machine, or
- run DOS or even Windows apps on an x86 system and interact with them from a
    UNIX system (the latter by actually serving up separate instances of Windows itself
    as a DOS app)

The company I worked for then used it as an application server, running DOS DB and other software on heavy duty PCs and serving up instances of it to less powerful workstations.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[jmknsd]

There is a pretty good description here: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

Pretty much all of the modern advances in Linux Graphics have been to push the performance sensitive parts of X to the kernel and the client. In current 3D apps, X does little more than the Wayland compositor does, but adds a cumbersome middle man.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[maxwell demon]

It could be nice to run a huge CPU and RAM hog on your PC at home and have just the display on your mobile.. I could see a use case in that.

VNC?

Its not a two way race, but at least a three way race.

Do you happen to pay for your data transfer?
How much data traffic does a VNC connection cause? How much a well-written X program?

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone? Still on a 15" 1024x768 here. Unaccellerated because the accellerated driver crashes the system, and crashes it hard. Not that it matters because next to xterms the only thing I really use on it is firefox, and that hogs so much cpu the counter goes haywire (>>100%, even >200% usage on a single core CPU). That /. posting about modern coders not having a clue? It's true in spades and you can see it painfully clearly as soon as you're not on the latest hardware. Every project, big ones moreso, ought to run regular Q&A on slower hardware. *Everyone* gets more bang for their hardware bucks that way.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you happen to pay for your data transfer?
How much data traffic does a VNC connection cause? How much a well-written X program?

Double standards much?

If the program is well-written you can run it on your mobile.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[alantus]

I would mod you up if I had the points.
I just find it crazy that X requires python!

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Everyone"? You're delusional.

Explain to me, because I'm fascinated by your difficulty in understanding, what would be the point in having a 27" monitor if all the applications you use have huge, crappy, inefficient, cluttered GUIs? The only significant benefit to having a bigger screen to begin with is being able to have multiple applications on the screen at once.

If programs like Firefox kept their inefficient, dated GUI, and instead of inteligently refactoring it into something better designed and less wasteful decided to scale the GUI's clutter and crappiness with the size of your monitor, there'd be no point in having a big monitor.

Anyone with a large screen should be thankful that smaller devices are becoming more popular, because they're making your screens even bigger, relatively-speaking. It was the perfect motivation for developers to actually put intelligent thought into their GUIs for once.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's this slashmyth that the desktop is dead (or about to die) and we're heaving them to the trash dumps by the millions. It's part of the Slashdot extremism machine. "There sure are a lot of mobile devices out there" becomes "There are only mobile devices out there." This filters back to some clueless idiots that make things happen. (They make things happen so they should get a lot of credit, never mind weather they make the right things happen. Fan boys are at work; move aside!)

OMG Oh it looks like my pony phone!!! It's SUPER!

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Microlith]

Unfortunately, both the 50" TV and 27" screen are 1920x1080, both of which only have a hair more resolution than my 20.1" desktop monitor.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Urkki]

Problem with X11 on mobile use is, the applications don't support going to the background, they don't support the X server suddenly just disappearing, then re-appearing at a completely different address. For this reason, VNC and its ilk are much more suitable for mobile remote desktop use.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[maxwell demon]

The biggest problem with X11 is that it's licensed under a non-free non-GPL license. For Linux to be a truly free operating system it cannot rely on a display system which fundamentally does not respect users freedom.

In what way exactly is the X11 license non-free?

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[mpol]

That sounds as if Wayland is allright. I just hope it doesn't turn into the next PulseAudio or NetworkManager.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[maxwell demon]

Double standards much?

No. Where do you see any?

If the program is well-written you can run it on your mobile.

Not necessarily. It may need lots of RAM because it uses lots of data. Or it may need a fast network connection, or fast access to a large hard disk (or rather, the data being stored on that hard disk). Or it may have some licensing issues which binds it to the specific computer. Or it may be a closed source program which simply isn't compiled for the mobile. Or it may be that it talks to hardware connected to that computer, not to the mobile. Or ...

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because your 20.1" monitor sucks. You should upgrade to a 5-year old 22"er like mine, and have 4x the resolution. Oh, let me guess, too cheap to blow a k$ on a T221? Then quit bitching

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[smash]

X11 has an inbuilt PDF display engine now?

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[yourmommycalled]

Riiight! That's why linux developers stripped out the BSD license out of code and put in their GPL into it. Just so they respect the "users" freedom

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[couchslug]

"Is it really necessary to run the same display server on your phone and your desktop?"

What desktop? The world will soon be nothing but smart phones and servers. (runs)

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

This AC just stated that "everyone" is too cheap to blow $1000 on a T221, providing ammo against GGP's point about 50" TV and 27" being superior when functionally being the same or less than OEMs are bundling with your run-of-the-mill $300 computer. And it's not like 42"+ is a baseline standard at homes yet --it only overrode the 32" and 37" minimums just last year, so attrition purchasing and adoption curves will hold the averages below 50" (a very trollish number!) down for a couple more years.

Not like anyone ever gets $1000 27" screens bundled with their $300 PC anyway, so all the average non-nerd American has at home is still 4x3 screens with 1024 or 1280 vertical pixels if lucky... For those buying desktops with Windows 7, the crisis is in full swing with 900 max vertical resolution, and sub-movie 1600 resolutions. So we're not even getting movie-watchable resolutions with the annoying ratios that were meant to replace 4x3 for no other reason than movie-watching. Shame.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Joe Jay Bee]

Debian seem quite happy with the licensing of X.org. Were what you are saying true, they'd go haywire. As it is, it's in main and it's free.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[yet-another-lobbyist]

So how does the Wayland solution do in terms of bandwidth? I am not sure I fully understand your explanation, but it sounds like entire images are transferred, rather than just the drawing commands. Sounds like it would be using as much bandwidth as the "offscreen image" workaround.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[jelle]

"If only it was engineered like a modern TV to burn out in a year or two"

So was most stuff in the 80s. The TV just got lucky.

At any point in time T, there will always be peope with a still working product of T-30 years wondering why they nowadays "don't make products like that anymore", ignoring how many products from time T-30 years have broken down many many years ago and are long forgotten.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Chemisor]

Wayland does not use any bandwidth because it is a local-only server. You have no remote client capability at all. Yes, you manage your own images, but they don't have to go anywhere because the server is always on the same machine and can be given a pointer via shmat. Naturally, this way you get to implement your own rendering by writing primitive rasteriser or by implementing your own graphics card driver (because there is no GPU interface except for OpenGL, GLX, and DRI) and sending commands via the kernel DRM interface.

This whole bloody debacle could have been easily solved just by adding BeginFrame and EndFrame commands to the X protocol, but clearly that would have been too easy.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[man_of_mr_e]

I think he's confusing copyleft with non-free. Some people are under the mistaken impression that if it's not copyleft, it's not free.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[diego.viola]

How about SPICE or RDP?

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[diego.viola]

I'm sure Wayland will do much well there and everywhere else than X11. Wayland is a lot more minimal.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[marcosdumay]

"...what would be the point in having a 27" monitor if all the applications you use have huge, crappy, inefficient, cluttered GUIs?"

That does not explain why no software cared about having an efficient GUI after those huge screen become popular.

Of course, the GP was just being too much cinic to talk about the real problem here. All software is trying to fit into mobile now, even at the expense of fitting in the desktop. Well, desktop (and comparatively sized laptops) are still kings, and altough mobile may be more numerous in the future, they won't replace the desktop, server, mainframe or supercomputer. So, expect in the future a wave of software just "discoveing" they need to fit the desktop, and talking about how just adding a couple of GUI elements won't hurt, that you can make use of a large disk, and that keyboards are a really fast user interface, so you should be prepared to use it.

If you are not new here, you may remember something similar happening when the mouse become widespread.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm.. didn't the X double buffer extension address that particular issue long before either of Composite and Sync? But of course more modern things like Xinerama tend to break it.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[osu-neko]

Unfortunately, both the 50" TV and 27" screen are 1920x1080, both of which only have a hair more resolution than my 20.1" desktop monitor.

This is, unfortunately, less vertical resolution than I've been accustomed to for the last decade (both my six year old LCD monitor and the previous CRT ran at 1600x1200). I used to get a new monitor every few years for about the same cost as the previous one but with an upgraded resolution. It's now going on a decade since my last upgrade, and I will either have to downgrade, or pay significantly more just to break even. I really don't want to downgrade to 1080... :(

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

So my question then would be: Why can't a set of frame boundary definitions be added? It seems like it would be simple enough to have the server support either method and since it's the client sending the information back it only matters if they're defined *IF* the client supports them.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Anonymous Coward]

X has had the double buffer extension for a long time that addresses this problem.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[master_p]

If we are to rewrite our software to fix flickering, why not change X to support buffering per window? two simple commands (enable buffering / switch buffer) would be more than enough.

If buffering was enabled, the X server would execute the drawing commands on the buffer, and then draw the complete buffer on the screen on switching buffers.

The Wayland people say "we should get rid of X, it is too complicated", but what they offer does not have X's features, and they say that most probably X will always be there. So why bother with Wayland?

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[badkarmadayaccount]

Cellular standards have their own IP transfer specs, for everything else - Mobile IP. Changing IP address on the fly? Hell that'll break HTTP, screw everything else.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[Urkki]

Cellular standards have their own IP transfer specs, for everything else - Mobile IP. Changing IP address on the fly? Hell that'll break HTTP, screw everything else.

Eh, break HTTP? Change in user's IP will not break HTTP(S)-based applications at all. They're based on non-critical connections initiated from user's end, and cookies, and any persistent connections being re-created on the fly as needed.

HTTP(S)-based web applications can also survive suspend/hibernate without problem, even if user's machine gets completely different IP in completely different network when it wakes up, as long as there won't be session time-out during the sleep.

It may be a bit sad in a way, but for most common uses, mobile IP is not needed, so it will not be configured automatically for every user (or even enabled without installing extra software), so uses and software that need it will not become common. Same applies to IPv6 actually, HTTP-based web works just fine with IPv4+NAT still as well as for mobile use with constantly changing network.

Re:What's wrong with X11?

[badkarmadayaccount]

Not if the IP change happens mid transfer. Though I think all these points are mute if SIP is adopted for a generic session layer protocol (long live OSI). It provides a consistent method for NAT traversal - ISPs and OEM only need to make sure that SIP works, the rest is a done deal. Not to mention that it would ease IPv6 migration, with a few DNS tweaks. Though it might partly duplicate UPnP HTTPU based port forwarding.

Not so stupid.

[BrokenHalo]

If you don't use any window compositing, my understanding is (correct me if I'm wrong) that you won't gain much from Wayland. I understand that Wayland offers a direct interface for window compositing, rather than having the compositing bolted on top of X11. The performance gain should be obvious, so it seems a Good Thing(TM) to me.

I would be the last to deny that X11 has served us loyally and well for decades, but if the user expects a more modern interface, there is little point in attempting to stop the tide.

Re:Not so stupid.

[maxwell demon]

I have no problems with a modern interface, as long as this doesn't mean taking essential features away. And yes, I do consider network transparency essential.

Re:Not so stupid.

[makomk]

You won't gain anything from Wayland, but you'll lose the ability to run any apps that require Wayland without using window compositing anymore, including losing the ability to run on hardware that doesn't support OpenGL, as well as stuff like network transparency...

Re:Not so stupid.

[mlwmohawk]

I would be the last to deny that X11 has served us loyally and well for decades, but if the user expects a more modern interface, there is little point in attempting to stop the tide.

When did you start using Linux? What was your previous computer OS?

There is NOTHING provided in Wayland that can't be done in X. Furthermore, Wayland is temporary. It will not scale to the many para-virtualized environment described. The "desktop" is dying, and this is only one last chance for idiots to make Linux irrelevant. With X, Linux will be ideally suited for the computers to come.

Stop the tide? Well, ignorance sure is corrosive, I'll give you that.

Re:Not so stupid.

[TheRaven64]

X is far from perfect (and I say this as someone who's written a compositing WM). There is a huge amount of the X11 protocol that no one actually uses anymore. Font rendering, for example, has to be done on the client or you get different sets of fonts for remote X11 (yuck!). For fast text rendering, you use the XRENDER extension, and store glyphs in the server then composite them. That takes care of text, but what about line drawings? X has basic drawing primitives, but most apps use something like Cairo to give a PostScript / PDF style drawing API, and Cairo doesn't use any of the X drawing primitives. It just draws everything into a pixmap and then sends it to the X server. This means that most of what people are actually using X for is getting a window that they can composite pixmaps into. And X sucks at that. The input model is also pretty horrible (take a look at how click-to-focus is implemented some time, it will make your brain hurt).

The problem with Wayland is that it doesn't seem much better. It's thinner, which is nice, but that's about it. It's also Linux-only (while X.org runs on all *NIX systems, plus Windows), and it is released under a less permissive license than X.org.

Re:Not so stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've yet to figure out how Wayland presents a "more modern interface" to the user. To me that sounds like a boat load of hype from the clueless. But then the article is from Phoronix, so I guess it's to be expected. They have a long history of "showing" everything to be a smoking gun that "proves" some bullshit to be true.

Can you please explain what it does to present a "more modern interface" to the user?

Re:Not so stupid.

[BrokenHalo]

When did you start using Linux?

About 1995.

What was your previous computer OS?

In roughly chronological order, dating from the '70s:
Burroughs MCP-IV -> MCP-XI
Honeywell DPS-x
Sperry/UNIVAC Exec-x
IBM MVS
VMS
VME
PRIMOS
AOS/VS and AOS/VS-2
I suppose I have to fit DOS in there somewhere, and I'm sure I've missed a few, but you get the picture...

Re:Not so stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

X isn't all that network transparent. It performs absolutely horribly on anything with >25ms latency. You can't connect to a remotely running application that's already running. If your connection dies, the application dies. Most of these shortcomings can be squarely blamed on the statefulness of the X protocol.

(Before someone mentions it: VNC runs even worse.)

Even Remote Desktop works better than X. (As I understand it, Wayland should support something like Remote Desktop very easily; probably even at a single-Window level.)

Re:Not so stupid.

[maxwell demon]

X has basic drawing primitives, but most apps use something like Cairo to give a PostScript / PDF style drawing API, and Cairo doesn't use any of the X drawing primitives. It just draws everything into a pixmap and then sends it to the X server.

Ah, that explains a lot about why many of today's X applications are that slow over the network. But that's an argument against Cairo and other such implementations, not an argument against X. Which means that instead of replacing X, one probably should replace Cairo.

Re:Not so stupid.

[TheRaven64]

Well, you can move things into the X server, but currently X doesn't support anything like the functionality that cairo needs. There is no X command for drawing a bezier path. There isn't even an X primitive for drawing an antialiased line. That's why people use things like Cairo.

Now, ideally, I'd like something a bit more like Apple's display server, where PDF-like commands are streamed directly to the display server, which can then do the 2D rendering and compositing. One of the first things I'd do if I were implementing X12 is ditch all of the existing X11 drawing commands and add most of the PDF 1.4 operators - in fact, the set that the HTML 5 canvas tag exposes to JavaScript would do very nicely.

Re:Not so stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like NeWS.

Re:Not so stupid.

[gmueckl]

No, you got that backwards. Cairo as a drawing library provides features that X never was designed for and it offers them in a device- and platform-independent way, if required. So given the fact that all windowing toolkits that are worth mentioning support more than just X, depending on Cairo for rendering is the perfectly sane thing to do. Otherwise you risk a broken UI because it ends up looking differently on different platforms (e.g. truncated labels, graphics not showing correctly etc.).

Re:Not so stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

X has basic drawing primitives, but most apps use something like Cairo to give a PostScript / PDF style drawing API, and Cairo doesn't use any of the X drawing primitives. It just draws everything into a pixmap and then sends it to the X server. This means that most of what people are actually using X for is getting a window that they can composite pixmaps into.

You see this as a potential argument for ditching X, given a suitable replacement. I see it as an argument for ditching Cairo, or rewriting it to take advantage of the underlying display system -- people using Cairo mostly don't want or expect a pixmap buffer, they just want to draw shiny shapes -- the pixmap blitting is just a means to an end. Does this call for some enhancement to the X server, to support more modern operations (e.g. antialiased line, arc, etc.) so it _can_ draw those shiny shapes? Sure. But why junk it and start over with the wrong (pixmap-heavy) approach instead of upgrading X and Cairo to do it the right way to begin with?

Re:Not so stupid.

[TheRaven64]

NeWS and Display PostScript were very similar, but there were some differences. NeWS encouraged you to write entire view objects in PostScript. This was a bitch to maintain, but it was great for remote display. With NeWS, you clicked on a button and it ran a PostScript program showing the button in the pressed state and sent a message to the remote machine saying the button had been pressed. With DPS and X11, you click on a button, and it sends a 'mouse click at coordinates x, y' message to the remote server. The remote machine then sends back drawing commands to produce a pressed button. Over a slow link, this means that NeWS buttons respond immediately, while X11 / DPS buttons respond after 100+ms. The closest thing we have now is the web. The canvas tag and JavaScript basically provide a modern version of NeWS.

DPS was a bit different, and Apple ditched the programmability entirely when they moved to the PDF rendering model in Quartz. This means that the interface is simpler - you no longer need an interpreter in the display server - and the addition of all of the compositing stuff meant that you could do much better raster displays.

Given that PDF is actually quite a dense format already, I'd be tempted to simply define the wire protocol for drawing as encapsulated PDF objects. This would let you store any sequence of drawing commands (e.g. a button shape, a text glyph composed of bezier curves, or an image) on the display server trivially and then redraw it at the current position with just a single command. It would be really easy to implement this with the canvas tag, so you could have a simple display server implemented in a web browser using WebSocket for remote display anywhere, and a proper native version for local and remote display.

Re:Not so stupid.

[maxwell demon]

Is there any reason why those drawing commands could not be implemented as an X extension?

Re:Not so stupid.

[smash]

This can be bolted onto wayland without issue if it is required. See the X11 utility in OS X, or one of the myriad of X servers on Windows for examples. This way you can have a clean interface for the funky composting desktop, and lay X11 on top. Given that you're going to be running X11 soley for the remote display aspect, the minute performance hit you MAY get due to running via wayland instead of on bare metal will be un noticeable due to the network traffic in any case.

And thats discounting the fact that the code to wayland is likely to be far faster due to better hardware support without maintaining 20 years of backwards compatibility crap anyway. You WILL NOT LOSE remote display.

Re:Not so stupid.

[TheRaven64]

Other than protocol bloat, no. That was the original idea behind Cairo: provide a high-level API that people could use on X11 now, and then implement primitives for supporting Cairo on the server side, with a protocol extension for transferring them, when Cairo's API was a bit more stable (which it is now). Unfortunately, Cairo is LGPL, so if you wanted to move it into the server you'd need to reimplement it under the X11 license.

Re:Not so stupid.

[TheRaven64]

Does this call for some enhancement to the X server, to support more modern operations (e.g. antialiased line, arc, etc.) so it _can_ draw those shiny shapes? Sure

That's something I'd definitely be in favour of. As a first step, I'd like to see XInput2 (or whatever today's extension for supporting complex input devices is) properly stabilised. Then I'd like to see an extension that added PDF-style vector drawing primitives. Finally, I'd like to see an X12 protocol that ditched all of the bits of X11 that no one uses and moved all of the useful extensions into the core protocol, a reimplementation of xlib / xcb generating X12 protocol commands, and a proxy that transformed X11 into X12 so that you could still use modern X11 applications directly on X12.

Replacing X with something better is a good idea, but every few years someone says 'X11 is not perfect, let's replace it with something worse'.

Re:Not so stupid.

[maxwell demon]

Laying X11 on top of Wayland will not help me with running Wayland applications remotely. And if Wayland gets standard, new applications will be Wayland applications. That's my concern.
X servers aren't going to go away soon. But they help exactly nothing for applications which are not X applications.

Re:Not so stupid.

[maxwell demon]

Can't the server simply link to Cairo? AFAIU the LGPL doesn't affect code which merely links to covered code.

Re:Not so stupid.

[oursland]

So instead of fixing any perceived deficiencies in X, the plan is to rewrite from scratch? After all, that has worked out so well for others.

Re:Not so stupid.

[TheRaven64]

The LGPL doesn't stop it, but the general policy for X.org has always been not to allow code under anything more restrictive than the X11 license. The LGPL is more restrictive than the X11 license, so this is a problem. Wayland is under the same license, which could also be problematic on embedded devices, where the LGPL's requirement to be able to relink may not be possible to support.

That said, a quick and dirty implementation of the PDF rendering model wouldn't be too difficult, and Cairo could be an optional component for higher-quality rendering...

Re:Not so stupid.

[TheRaven64]

Well, it's Linux, not BSD. The BSD strategy when something isn't perfect is to incrementally improve it. The Linux strategy is to throw it away and replace it with something much worse.

Re:Not so stupid.

[jmknsd]

I made another post to this effect, but it seems to have gone unnoticed:

I am currently working on implementing a standalone project that enables running Wayland applications remotely for my GSoC project. This functionality is important to many of the devs who work on the linux graphics stacks, and it will be implemented.

Re:Not so stupid.

[jmknsd]

My understanding is that Wayland is just a spec, the compositor and the client are separate programs that just communicate over a socket and a shared buffer. And that if you wanted to make and then use this PDF based renderer, you could then call it from any client, and it would make no difference to the compositor at all. This seems like a better architecture than forcing clients to use whatever inside X, or adding something on to X before they can use it.

Re:Not so stupid.

[maxwell demon]

So how do you handle shared memory? I hope without clogging the connection ...

Re:Not so stupid.

[Knuckles]

But if Qt/KDE and gtk+/Gnome support Wayland in addition of X, won't the apps get Wayland support for free, and will be able to use either?

Re:Not so stupid.

[jmknsd]

I use existing tools, so the data going over the socket is the same, but a second socket is used with an RFB-like protocol that syncs up the framebuffers on damage and creation. Later, there will need to be a third socket for Drag and Drop, but I am not that far yet.

Re:Not so stupid.

[styrotech]

Now, ideally, I'd like something a bit more like Apple's display server, where PDF-like commands are streamed directly to the display server, which can then do the 2D rendering and compositing.

Sounds a bit (to my uneducated ears) like that failed Berlin / Fresco project from about 10 yrs ago or so. They were probably ahead of their time and too ambitious, but it was an interesting project.

Re:Not so stupid.

[osu-neko]

So instead of fixing any perceived deficiencies in X, the plan is to rewrite from scratch?

No. Since most of what X does it irrelevant, the plan is to not rewrite it at all, and write a tool that does the job wanted rather than trying to bolt the functionality onto the tool that mostly does other stuff.

Re:Not so stupid.

[Bengie]

My understanding of X is that it is a complex abstract layer that makes porting extremely easy and very flexible. My other understanding is that X has a horrible amount of overhead and was designed a long time ago and can't properly make use of modern technology.

X has it's place, but it's not with low latency low overhead 3D accelerated desktop rendering. Everyone preaches about how great Opensource/Linux would be for gaming, but then people out-right refuse to make use of the newest of 3D hardware.

Wayland has a lot of promise for better 3D support. Might finally let me switch to Linux once it matures.

I always play the latest games on the latest hardware, so Linux' current situation doesn't work well for me, but I've been reading on a lot of future projects that makes it sound possible in the next 5 years. Opensource ATI drivers, Wayland, DX11 support.. sign me up.

I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an old fart, but as far as I'm concerned a computer is a tool to accomplish a goal not an end in itself. I use a computer to get work done, or for entertainment. In both activities I couldn't care less about the computer itself, as long as it is efficient and stays out of the way.

Now look at the trends today. Every major window manager seems thoroughly convinced that mo' shiny is mo' better. Transparant everything, all-singing all-dancing window animations. Very clever stuff, but does it help me get my work done faster?

I realize that preferences are very personal, but perhaps I'm not completely wrong when I say that, in general, Gnome 2 is a whole lot better for getting work done than Gnome 3/Shell or Unity. Also, every window manager seems to be targeting tablets and netbooks, but completely ruining the experience on actual real displays where there is plenty of screen real estate. Why?

Now X somehow just has to be replaced by Wayland, perhaps for the same reason PulseAudio just had to replace Alsa. Change for the sake of chance. Ticklist features.

Perhaps there is no glory in delivering a stable, mature platform anymore. Perhaps developers these days want to work on 'teh shiny' only.

As I said, I'm an old fart, but perhaps all these new-fangled thingamajigs should really vacate my lawn...

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[outsider007]

Nobody's forcing updates on you, old timer.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[maxwell demon]

Nobody's forcing updates on you, old timer.

Sure. Except that you do want to get security fixes. And you probably also want to run a few new applications.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Window managers are not the same thing as desktop environments. Gnome 2/3, Unity, and KDE are all desktop environments (the ones with the shiny effects you complain about). Openbox and Fluxbox are two examples of window managers that by default have a very minimal configuration. Last time I checked, nobody was forcing you to switch from X to Wayland or Gnome 2 to 3. You can still use ALSA, you can disable desktop effects, and do pretty much whatever you want. If you are too lazy to change the settings that you're unhappy with then you really shouldn't complain.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Short Circuit]

Last time I checked, nobody was forcing you to switch from X to Wayland or Gnome 2 to 3.

And nobody forced me to switch from GNOME 1.4 to GNOME 2, right? Or from browsers that support HTML 1 to HTML 5? Or from FTP+{IPSec|SSL} to SFTP?Wherever the most users are, that's where developers will go. Developer time is a finite resource, and any time developers go somewhere, they have to leave something behind.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't move to new systems, but there are very stable and usable features in old systems which don't exist in new systems, and there's always some cost..

Some apps written for GNOME 1.4 were never ported to GNOME 2, because their developers abandoned them. (I can't think of examples off-hand, I just recall encountering the problem at the time of transition) HTML 1 was a very simple, straightforward means of conveying information for rendering and presenting to humans. It just wasn't fancy enough, so it was replaced. Did you know that FTP allows you to instruct one FTP server to transfer a file to another? That's pretty epic when the two servers have a connection 10-100 times as fast as your connection to either--and tools like IPSec, SSL or a secured layer 2 made that reasonably safe.

Yes, each of these older systems had their own faults, and newer versions sought to cope with those faults, but new versions often fail to retain the flexibility and existing utility of old versions. I shudder to think how many hours of coder's times are spent shoehorning existing things into new systems or on top of new paradigms. Worse, everybody thinks they've invented something new, when all they've done is (often inadvertently) re-invented something a decade or six old in a new context.

It feels like make-work for a stagnant field. Pay someone to tear down the old road and build a new road, except the new road isn't even expected to last as long. We're not accelerating innovation as fast as we tend to think, we're stuck in a mud puddle and spinning our wheels.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Osgeld]

X is the underling tech that displays all those new shiny borked GUI's and your old favorites too, it sort of needs to go because it rarely gets used for what its intended and is a big bloated overcomplicated pain in the ass for normal desktop use!

now the optimal time to do that would have been a decade or more ago when it took unholy matters of hell to get X working worth a shit on older machines, now whats the point we all have at least a quarter gig of ram and a 1+Ghz cpu and X is just a tiny tidbit

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[visualight]

What? yes, updates are forced on everyone, eventually.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[RightwingNutjob]

X is mature code and it works. It makes sense to replace it only if you replace it with something *better*, which is different from *shinier*. Dropping pretty basic features like network transparency because it doesn't make sense on tablets, or for n00bs, or etc is bad engineering, bad philosophy, and bad karma.

You should not condition the capabilities of a system on the capabilities of its least experienced users.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not an old timer. If he was, he'd know that pulse audio doesn't replace alsa. They're on completely different layers.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's saying that you won't be able to have network transparency in Wayland? Please inform yourself before you post. Go read about SPICE and RDP.

Yes you will be able to redirect individual windows as well as full root windows with these protocols.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[man_of_mr_e]

And I bet you just want phone that only makes phone calls as well, or a TV that just displays channels, or a DVR that only records programs, or an MP3 player that only plays music...

Fact is, the market is filled with people, and the trend is to integrate things so that one product appeals to the broad market.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

And no one is forcing anyone to use a computer.

Yet if the only shipping versions of UNIX are not using X11 and new software isn't written for use with X11 - I guess one can just do without.

Kind of like how choosing UNIX means you can't run Windows games.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Tanktalus]

Well, I agree with you. Except that transparency in my desktop helps me get my work done faster. First off, if it's opaque, it's got focus. And that is something I can say on many layers: the window with the WM's concept of "focus" (where keystrokes go) is displayed opaquely, but because it's opaque, it naturally gets my attention and focus. The time I spend guessing which window has focus is reduced. I know that, in the past, the window's title bar would show whether that window had focus or not, but with two monitors and eight apps, that takes more effort. Somehow, the opaque window just stands out - probably because the whole window shows whether it has focus or not instead of just a tiny bit near the top. Also, I've noticed that if I want to see something in one window while I'm doing something in another window, even if the one I'm looking at isn't at the top, I can often see it to gather its information (debugger, for example) for whatever I need it for. I spend less time shifting windows around, so, again, my work is getting done faster.

Just going off the KDE4 effects I currently have enabled: Blur - background stuff goes blurry, making it less likely to attract my focus, helping me focus on the task at hand; Dialog Parent - "Darkens the parent window of the currently active dialog" (making the dialog stand out in contrast, again, focus); Dim Inactive - "Darken inactive windows" (making the active window stand out in contrast); Slide Back - "Slide back windows losing focus" (simulates paper being moved out of the way - making your virtual desktop seem more like a real one, which ties it mentally with switching tasks - it works for me); various task switchers (currently "Cover Switch") - zoom out from the desktop while switching tasks with alt+tab, making it easier to find the one you want.

Yes, there's plenty of "candy" enabled, too. And plenty more that I don't have enabled. But, seriously, the same technology can be productive.

To the original topic, I don't care what is rendering the windows on my screen. What I do care about is being able to run remote applications on my screen without VNC or rdesktop or any of that other stuff. I do use VNC, but it's for particular problems when X over SSH is not sufficient. And when X over SSH is sufficient, VNC is unnecessary overhead. So long as Wayland still supports this even for Wayland clients, and not just for X-compatibility, I won't really care. Of course, if they're using new protocols and/or new ports, Wayland-over-SSH may need patches to SSH. Again, I won't really care, as long as it works.

Today, among other things, I run Lotus Notes over SSH - which allows Sametime IM's to pop up on whatever desktop I'm on, allowing co-workers to ping me, and also puts the Sametime icon in the system tray. If I were running this on VNC, the sametime icon and IM's would all be constrained to that VNC client, making it much less likely for me to see it. If Wayland doesn't allow this, it's dead to me.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[turgid]

You don't need to let yourself become dominated by a desktop environment.

I've been using a plain old window manager, Window Maker, for 10 years now, since AfterStep became crippled by bells and whistles.

I watch desktop environments come and go.

Window Maker is wonderful. It's tasteful, light-weight and it just works. Best of all, it has a very simple menu (right-click on the root window) and it can be edited with vi. if you can't be bothered running the GUI tool.

It would take a loaded gun at my head to take me away from Window Maker.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[spooky_d]

Just one question: when was the last time when you wrote code using XLib? Or XCB for that matter. I would take ANYTIME any kind of API that gives me some power, and doesn't make me stupid in the process.

It's very hard to do stuff with the old ways of X. It's very hard to get over the damned protocol to actually have some fast graphics. The X protocol is bad, and it's bad not because the design is bad (some ideas are very neat, really) but because the evolution of hardware and software made it obsolete.

It's a damn shame that Qt and Gtk actually rely on X to do performance jobs. But not KDE is the problem - if you want to keep your old applications you can very well keep them - you can still install Qt 3 or Qt 4, and work with X, and patch your application.

But the 'old anonymous coward fart' wants to use his xfig, he's more than welcome. He can use it in a virtual machine, where he runs his old distribution, hopefully with better performances because Wayland helps instead of getting in the way.

And BTW: I wonder how many FTP servers implement that feature you're talking about.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[shish]

X somehow just has to be replaced by Wayland, perhaps for the same reason PulseAudio just had to replace Alsa

This is an interesting comparison; I see one as a step forward and one as a step back -- X and Pulse are relatively complicated, but massively flexible and useful, and network transparency is a core design idea that makes several other normally impossible things simple; Wayland and Alsa are smaller and simpler, and work in the 99% of common cases -- but it's the 1% of special cases that really make linux stand out for me.

(Tangentially, I might even say that Pulse is better than X - with pulse, one can change output devices on the fly, where X apps need to be stopped and restarted when you move between thin clients - IIRC there was some work to keep them running locally, but I never saw that actually work...)

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Microlith]

X is mature code and it works.

Except when it doesn't. And no one can fix it because it wasn't designed for the hardware models we have today.

It makes sense to replace it only if you replace it with something *better*, which is different from *shinier*. Dropping pretty basic features like network transparency because it doesn't make sense on tablets, or for n00bs, or etc is bad engineering, bad philosophy, and bad karma.

Then perhaps people should step up and lead the charge in the opposite direction instead of sitting back and bitching.

You should not condition the capabilities of a system on the capabilities of its least experienced users.

Funny, that's what GNOME3 is doing but I don't see that happening with Wayland. I suggest getting off your ass and making a point (since the only point being made in this thread is network transparency) about it.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Short Circuit]

Just one question: when was the last time when you wrote code using XLib? Or XCB for that matter.

A few months ago. Why? Personal interest. More recently, I've been working on tracking down a bug I've noticed when running luminance-hdr over X11 forwarding over SSH. I get X11 protocol errors which suggest data corruption. I think the bug is in either my sshd or my ssh client; I don't get the errors if I run over raw TCP.

It's very hard to do stuff with the old ways of X. It's very hard to get over the damned protocol to actually have some fast graphics.

I don't disagree. If you have an app which requires a high framerate with active changes in graphics, raw X11 isn't going to be close to ideal, and it doesn't seem that the existing commonly-available extensions to X make it much easier.

The X protocol is bad, and it's bad not because the design is bad (some ideas are very neat, really) but because the evolution of hardware and software made it obsolete.

Here I'd disagree with the wording, but you're substantially correct. The path of hardware and software evolution have made it inconvenient. It was driven by demand for fast, cheap 3D rendering on consumer PCs on Windows. (Which is probably part of why I keep hearing Wayland compared to Windows' graphical model)

This drove an assumption of very-low-latency connections between the graphical display and the application, and that assumption persists to this day.

But the 'old anonymous coward fart' wants to use his xfig, he's more than welcome. He can use it in a virtual machine, where he runs his old distribution, hopefully with better performances because Wayland helps instead of getting in the way.

I'm not the AC you're referring to, but I'm also one who loves X11. I've got two beefy machines on my network at home--mine and my fiancee's. When we have roleplaying company over, we both regularly use X11-over-SSH to run programs like PCGen or GURPS Character Assistant on laptops in a different room. When we're doing photo processing, we both regularly use X11 over the network to run our photo processing apps (she prefers ufraw, while I go for luminance-hdr).

I don't see how Wayland will help in that scenario.

And BTW: I wonder how many FTP servers implement that feature you're talking about.

Any that support both active and passive FTP modes, implemented naively (some FTP servers explicitly block active transfers to any but the user's IP as a security mechanism). This use case is specifically spelled out in RFC 959. See figure 2 in section 2.3. You, the user, open a control connection to both servers, you tell server1 to transfer the file passively (wait for a connection on a port), and you tell server2 to transfer the file actively, specifying server1:port as the destination.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, in your defense I'm still using WindowMaker as my primary window manager on all my gentoo boxes, as well as my father's 1996 era workstation. Combined with xfce's desktop/file manager it's very 1990's era, but it's also *MUCH* faster than the modern alternatives, less resource intensive, and it still gives me 99 percent of the productivity features available (and all of the ones I regularly use.)

Honestly I've got FAR less of an interest in Wayland and far more of an interest in development being focused towards Mesa, so we can finally get open source OpenCL support as well as OpenGL 3.3/4.x support so linux systems can finally be into the 2010's without still using OpenGL support from the early mid 2000's. Honestly the priorities in the linux dev communities nowadays don't seem in line with the priorities necessary to make them a valid competitor to either of the major proprietary OSes on the market. A pity too, because they're losing out on the low resource usage which used to make linux worthwhile, while still having far more hostile binary compatibility than either Windows or OSX. Neither of them might be perfect, but how many of you have bothered trying to run an old Loki app, or an older Introversion realse (unpatched) in recent years? They either segfault or throw symbol warnings because glibc, libstdc++ and prolly a half dozen other libraries have changed in a binary imcompatible way in the meantime and all those apps are next to useless unless you can find and compile the proper sets of libraries to allow them to continue loading.

Maybe it's just me, but that usually makes it far more relaxing to just load up an old windows version of an app in wine. Wine itself might not have full compatibility, but you know for a fact the apps almost certainly will still run.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[spooky_d]

I agree with you in the fact that X is great technology. I even understand the love you have for it. But it's still an obsolete model, and Wayland is a step up; sure, it will take a while to mature; sure, it won't have what X has. But it has something that the 99% of the current Ubuntu users want. Some lean and mean redering machine.

I had the misfortune of working with X and XLib, and it was one of the main reasons of a failed project (a media center that had more features than most media center software have now). I personally hate and love X. I frankly am hoping for a better X and Wayland, somehow, feels like it's just that. For me.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[dave87656]

I thought one of the advantages of Wayland over X is that it is easier to program. I tried coding an Xt app once and it was surprisingly low level and time consuming. Of course, it was very quick, but that's not really a criteria now (you wouldn't notice the difference on today's hardware).

The net effect of the easier programming model should be more features in the long run.

Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit?

[devphaeton]

I really like WMaker as well. Quick, simple, clean, stable. I ran it for years and years on Debian Sid, and whenever I have a minimal OS install on a low-end machine it's what I choose.

The *only* thing I would ever change on it would be to update some of the default fonts. I no longer have the vision of my early 20s, and when you increase the size of the fonts that it has they get seriously late-80s nasty looking. The whole environment is a bit dated looking. I'm not looking for shine, transparency nor fancy animations. But a little 'smoothing' of some of the visual elements would go a LONG way with Windowmaker.

Fwiw, I moved over to XFCE a while back and I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm sure I am not alone

[Anonymous Coward]

in asking who is Wayland, or where is it - it sounds like an English name, but I see there are some towns in the US also.

Re:I'm sure I am not alone

[ville]

It's a planet from Star Wars of course.

// ville

Re:I'm sure I am not alone

[maxwell demon]

It's a planet from Star Wars of course.

// ville

From that page:

Wayland is where Emperor Palpatine's secret toy-box was. All kinds of nasty dark side things on Wayland.

I see. Wayland, the dark side of the (open) source. :-)

Re:Obese Fat Overweight Lard

[Anonymous Coward]

Kim Jong Il? Trolling for food again??

Don't bother...

[Anonymous Coward]

Obama will beat Wayland in 2012, no contest.

X allows us to use legacy programs

[Sir_Kurt]

In our office, we use the ability to run programs remotely on a regular basis. It is particularly useful for running programs that have dependencies that are no longer included in modern linux distributions.

As an example, I am a big fan of Word Perfect. I have used it to write specifications in our architectural office since maybe 1986. As some of you may recall, Word Perfect was available as a native Linux application -not a port or WINE abortion- I love this program, and would reinstall it at each upgrade, moving the required libraries from the old 2.0 kernel as needed.

Starting about Fedora Core 3, It just couldn't be installed in a way that was useful.

I solved this by installing RH9 on an old box, installed the libraries from Kernel 2.0 installed WP and have been happily running WP on this box with the display appearing on whatever computer I happen to be using ever since.

This is just one example, and maybe seems like a cranky one, but we have many other examples, such as pushing intensive computational tasks off to another computer while having the display on the desktop.

We will miss X greatly. Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?

Kurt

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect this is sponsored by any company with enough patents to torpedo Wayland as soon as it becomes dominant over X11.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Morose]

So just use something like VirtualBox or KVM with the desktop integration features. You'd probably be able to accomplish the same type of setup but without the need for an extra box.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[sgt scrub]

Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?

Rectangles with rounded edges is my short answer. The PIM interface is the perfect interface for stupid people. Ever since the iPhone came out with its 3d looking buttons (rectangles with rounded edges) that has been the defacto preferred "standard" to chase. The tech industry, being a follow the leader industry, is chasing that preferred look and feel. Really hard stuff like network accessible interfaces are being pushed away because they are not sexy.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[jmknsd]

Wayland supports being run inside X, as well as running individual apps, and entire desktops running on top of X within Wayland. And not an X emulator; since wayland basically passes framebuffers around, running real X on top of was one of the first things done. Not only will the functionality of being able to run remote X apps be maintained, X support is being maintained in pretty much every way I can think of.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Microlith]

I've noticed a lot of comments like yours, crying about how Linux is being "dumbed down" for the sake of "stupid people."

I am at a loss as to where this contempt for other users, who might want decent graphics for their desktop and mobile systems, comes from. Can you tell me? Why such resistance to change is channeled into hatred for others, instead of into valid arguments that might result in seeing your concerns addressed?

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Microlith]

Then do the IT thing and manage your old server with your old applications. Stop insisting that the rest of the Linux world be held back so as to service your concerns. It's not like they're going to outright eliminate your ability to use Xorg, or ban Xservers running on Wayland (which already exist, iirc.)

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[DrXym]

We will miss X greatly. Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?

Run X over Wayland as a client. In exactly the same way that X is supported Windows or OS X.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Anonymous Coward]

> In exactly the same way that X is supported Windows or OS X.

Riiiight. As a sucky second-class citizen. Fuck that.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[STDOUBT]

The contempt comes from the understanding that these users don't understand Linux. It comes from knowing what a treasure we have in Linux, and seeing all the "dumb" adopters wishing it were more like "that other OS". It's maddening. I can't wait until HaikuOS kicks in. We can direct them all there and be done with it. Also, "decent graphics" is subjective in the extreme. I guess it's about priorities. Some people can't tolerate a UI that's not super pretty. Some people think pretty is more important than Libre. Yet they still won't just go buy a Mac. Well guess what? Stick around with Linux long enough and you'll get what you want. Just look how far the various GUIs under X11 have come in several years. Imagine how nice and shiny it will be years from now. But I bet even then people will bitch about how it's just not good enough compared to "________OS". I don't _hate_ anyone for this assbaggery, but it sure if good and goddamned annoying sometimes.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[jedidiah]

If you can't figure it out then perhaps you're just one of the stupid ones.

The whole point of a general purpose computing device is that it is infinitely flexible. With that, comes a bit of complexity as overhead.

Furthermore, attempting to castrate user interfaces interferes with the whole "infinitely flexible" thing that gives computing devices their biggest value.

"Pandering to idiots" is the most common excuse given for castrating computing systems today and tend to be given by those driving the change rather than those complaining about the change.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[jedidiah]

Linux is not being held back by avoiding nonsense like Wayland.

That is just mindless "new must be good" simpleton sort of reasoning.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[jedidiah]

Yes. That works just great for iLife or MCE.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[qwertyatwork]

Stupid people shouldn't use Linux. They should use Macs, or Windows. I started with slack ware in 1996, eventually I changed over to Debian testing. I ran Linux as my desktop os for 11 years. In 2007 I got a Mac, and couldn't be happier. Linux is a great server os, but after 11 years of using it on the desktop I was glad to finally give it up. Linux has its place. It's not on the desktop, never has been, never will be.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[sgt scrub]

Actually my post was about the tech industry being follow the leaders and doing the easy stuff and PIM's (not Linux) being good for stupid people. ie. The tech industry is doing the easy thing and following the leader --> PIM interfaces. As far as my thoughts on Linux... I don't think it is being dumbed down. The Linux front is better than ever. I couldn't possibly list all of the improvements to the kernel off the top of my head. libuuid and gdisk are two things in GNU space I can think of that are REALLY cool up and comers if you want to confuse Linux with GNU bits and pieces. Still my opinion stands on the GUI front, focusing on the easy stuff and chasing the stupid user at the expense of something brilliant is bad.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[couchslug]

"We will miss X greatly. Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?"

Because Shiny Change is Progress and Refinement is Boring.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Sancho]

I think the contempt comes from a bit if elitism. Being elite is a good thing, but being elitist isn't. Historically, Linux users have been highly technical people who knew systems and code well enough to get things working on their machines. I've been on USENET groups, mailing lists, and later forums where these kinds of people berated new users when they asked for help. It's nothing new. The rage is just directed in a different direction now--instead of at the newbies who are trying to learn, it's directed at the packagers and developers who are making life too easy and letting too many people into the club.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[fnj]

All right, let me try to explain it, because it's a good idea to understand it.

It's not contempt for users; it's contempt for TRYING TO MAKE USERS STUPID. Trying to make users stupid is very condescending and insulting. From what I have seen, users as a whole are a lot smarter than these elitist egotistical morons who are trying to dumb down the desktop, the windowing system, and ultimately the operating system. The average six year old whom I sit in front of a Gnome2 or KDE3 linux desktop feels right at home practically immediately. They find it intuitive and efficient

The change that is being resisted is all change FOR THE WORSE. It is STUPID change. Just stop trying to RUIN perfectly working stuff.

I'm not completely convinced one way or the other yet whether Wayland is an example of the product of these morons. I do know that the Gnome3, Ubuntu Unity, (and to a certain very real extent KDE4) disasters are a result of this idiocy.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[guantamanera]

if you want to run old programs all you need to grab everysingle library that program depends on. I have managed to run old applications using portablelinuxapps There was also a story here in slashdot of another program that allowed you to grab all the dependencies of an old program to run in modern distributions but I couldn't find the story.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Microlith]

Just for reference, I think a screenshot of this entire thread is a great example of why people lash out against Linux users. The arrogance and piss poor attitude (and completely missing the point) are great examples of ways to hinder Linux adoption as a whole. It's like reading Dirk Hohndel's thread on G+ about the Desktop Summit and how people were attacked and bashed, face to face, for criticizing GNOME3.

it's contempt for TRYING TO MAKE USERS STUPID

Which has little to nothing to do with creating a graphical subsystem that works around the flaws in Xorg. All I see people screaming about in this thread is rendering windows over the network, and not a single bit of discussion regarding the security questions, changes to DRM and DRI in the kernel, or the video of the talk by the lead of Xorg.

This has nothing to do with the idiocy behind GNOME3, Unity, or KDE4. This is about Wayland, an Xorg replacement.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[DrXym]

Pray tell what difference it would make please.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Microlith]

Even when it solves security, rendering, and configuration problems? That's bad?

This isn't "new for new's sake," but I have yet to see any real arguments other than "omg network transparency!"

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[diego.viola]

Nobody is screwing everything, you might be able to run a virtual machine for your old OS and code, and for the network transparency, well, you can just run SPICE/RDP with Wayland and redirect single windows or the entire desktop over the network. Wayland is a big win for Linux.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[diego.viola]

Judging by how you write, the moron here is you.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[visualight]

I will explain it to you.

It's about unnecessary and unwanted abstraction layers that serve only to present a false mental image of what a computer is and how it works, hindering the users ability to actually learn something.

For example, a file browser that removes the "UP" button because dumb users will not understand a directory structure. They should have only a Back button like a web browser does.

The disrespect for users comes not from people complaining about these new UI "improvements" but from the devs who think it's a good idea to implement them. *They* are the ones who think users are dumb and are actively working to keep them that way.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[diego.viola]

Then go and use an old distro with X, because not everyone wants to be stuck with old technology and we won't hold progress for you and other few retards who can't move on.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Anonymous Coward]

it's regress, not progress.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Anonymous Coward]

With all due respect the reason that file managers have recently started removing the up button is not because "Dumb" users don't understand the directory structure. But because the new breadcrumb trail style url widget now does this job and does it better than the old up button did (you can choose the number of steps up in one click).
Of course sometimes you need to type in a url and in that case you can very easily switch the url widget to text entry mode and back.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[KugelKurt]

I suspect this is sponsored by any company with enough patents to torpedo Wayland as soon as it becomes dominant over X11.

Wayland is mostly developed by Intel. So good luck messing with them... ;-)

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[WorLord]

I wish I could upvote this.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run an X server on Windows. Why shouldnt you be able to run one on Wayland

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[diego.viola]

Same here, please someone upvote. Wayland FTW.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[diego.viola]

It's regress only if you don't know any better. For the rest of us, who want a better, modern display system, it's a huge progress.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[diego.viola]

Haters gonna hate, just ignore them, they might as well go and use Windows 3.11.

Re:X allows us to use legacy programs

[A Jew]

You'd still be able to do that with an X server running on top of Wayland, and there are various ways Wayland apps can be displayed on a remote server, avan on top of X.

Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibility.

[dfaure]

Typical slashdot: the article distorts the truth in order to get reactions.

It was pretty clear during that presentation that the goal was to make it possible to still run X applications -- using a rootless X server -- and that this would also allow X-over-the-network use cases.
X11 is not going away, the idea is to use Wayland -and- X.

Not so stupid?

[jmbeck15]

It sounds like Wayland WILL support this behavior. It's all based on messages passed through sockets; what makes you think you couldn't pass the same messages to another terminal/computer?

Re:Not so stupid?

[maxwell demon]

AFAIU it uses shared memory. How do you use shared memory across computers without an insane amount of communication?

An alternative:

[Anonymous Coward]

Drop KDE

Re:An alternative:

[TheCycoONE]

A little bit of overkill when X support would still exist. The ongoing kwin project which makes this possible was to abstract the composting from the rest of kwin so that people could choose which compositor to use. The first example is OpenGL ES vs OpenGL 2, which currently has to be compiled separately but in 4.8 will be a runtime option.

(The story is focusing on Martin's KWin talk so I'm addressing that aspect)

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[gman003]

So Wayland is more like X12, then.

How about reading Wayland's FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

instead of talking out of your ass?

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[Anonymous Coward]

except without remote capability. It's a huge step backwards. Do you _really_ think toolkits/apps will be compiled to support both wayland and X simulataneously? No, of course not. X11 will be relegated to cygwin or osx-x11 status if the wayland guys get their way.

It's stupid. It's basically throwing away _the_ biggest advantage of the linux desktop, just when home local area networks / wifi are becoming ubiquitous. A properly extended X11 *should* allow guis to just follow me from room to room as appropriate. Will wayland allow that? Will it fuck. Might as well be windoze.

"which is dubbed the successor to X11" - by who?

[Anonymous Coward]

I get fed up with these sorry attempts to convince everyone that their opinion is not worth considering by implying that everyone else already disagrees with them.

Crooks, politicians and PR. I hate the lot of 'em.

"Some cleanup"

[warrax_666]

That's the understatement of the year. X11 is a dead end and it's time to face up to that fact.

(Just ask Keith Packard.)

Re:"Some cleanup"

[diego.viola]

Agreed. Wayland is the way to go.

Development releases a-la v4.0? No, thanks!

[VincenzoRomano]

I hope that support to X will stay for much longer.

It'd be nice not to repeat the notorious story with KDE v.4.

And, yes, all this bashing with "the old v4.0" is here because our scares done by KDE board still bleed.

Re:Development releases a-la v4.0? No, thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah blah. Go back and try to use Gnome 2.0. Or 2.1. Or 2.2. Or 2.3. Or 2.4. Or 2.5. Or 2.6.....

Re:Development releases a-la v4.0? No, thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go use KDE v4, then.

No parent is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Wayland does not support network transparency. Stop being daft.

Re:No parent is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Wayland isn't ignoring network transparency, it's trying to do one thing well: graphics.

Network transparency "a la" X style will be possible with protocols for networking, read: SPICE, RDP, VNC, whatever. and yes, it will be possible to send individual applications or the whole desktop to different machines. Don't worry.

Successor?

[STDOUBT]

Wayland is not the successor of X11 until Patrick Volkerding says it is.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[melikamp]

I use X over ssh daily for thunderbird, but I'll be first to point out that it is overrated. We have today a vastly superior protocol for GUI over the net: HTTPS. And in my mind, it is up to application developers to give us remote access, the way transmission does it. I am glad that X and Wayland cooperate so smoothly, but I am also glad that we are finally leaving X behind.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[maxwell demon]

Can you also run Wayland clients on a remote X desktop?

Wayland !$ Next-Gen X Server

[fast turtle]

If you don't believe me, check out the damn X11 site about the Wayland Project. It's purpose is to clean up the damn X11 code base to something easier to maintain and improve, which is why everyone is beginning to work with it. Find what needs improvement and get it's performance/stability up/over what the latest version of x11 offers.

Re:X11 will be around for quite a while yet

[jedidiah]

This is the real problem.

The perceived inefficiencies of X are less relevant on gigahertz machines where you've got much more idle CPU horsepower laying around than idle GPU power. Meanwhile, the most interesting GPU features (like vdpau/vaapi) will likely be tossed out in the bargain. Those are things not easily replicated with idle CPU cycles when compared to the main focus of Wayland.

Wayland and the Empire

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

The other bug, of course, was putting the future of the Linux Community in the hands of Grand Admiral Thrawn, with the Emperor's storehouse on Wayland. Have we truly chosen to go with the Empire, in the hope of developing a new clone army and ruling the known galaxy?

I thought Linux was more about being the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy, about tearing the droid's arms out of their sockets if they win but being willing to put them back together (backwards) and carry them on your back, about shooting Greedo first and stepping on Jabba's tail?

Re:Wayland and the Empire

[Anonymous Coward]

So here's a burning question that might come off as trollish, but it is serious:

Is starwars racist or just stupid?

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, in the sense you're not losing anything in this conversion. Wayland+X11 won't look (or perform) much different from modern composited system, but over time the toolkits & DEs will migrate out of needing X11 and to Wayland. Finally, there may be no need to run X11 (for you), and it will exist as a dependency for a few programs that haven't switched.

They're doing the work because it is an upgrade. XOrg isn't even fully X11 compatible since the spec is crazy. We need a new, easy, extensible spec, libs instead of processes for most display tasks, and something that better uses GPUs. Wayland is this effort. This simpler, modular system should make it easier to add anything missing while doing things the right way vs being stuck in "the old way" that cannot be changed in X11 without breaking something anyway.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[caseih]

Yes but as newer, shinier applications such as KDE apps bypass X and use Wayland directly for speed, does that mean we'll see the end of network-transparent apps? I hope not (and the other posts indicate that network transparency is being worked on).

What you are describing, however is exactly how OS X supports X11. Using a rootless X server that relegates X11 apps to very much second-class status. This is okay if the new wayland API and system offers everything that X11 did as far as network transparency and features.

Old Fart here again

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, Old Fart here again.

I know I don't have to follow in step with what the big distro's are doing. I assume most developers will follow with the new paradigms. So how long before applications start to rely on Wayland? How long before they just don't run on X or only via some emulation layer that breaks more things than it solves? It is just a matter of time.

Sure, I could stop updating my applications and use them as they are now. I still use xfig for diagrams so in a way that's not a new concept. It would mean that I have to sort-of maintain my own distro with a user base of one. Fine, I can do that, and I won't complain about that. There will come a time that I have to upgrade when hardware drivers refuse to support X (or the other way around, of course).

Still, I don't see why software that for the most part works just fine has to change into something new that is invariably less stable and, frankly, less usable. Don't fix what isn't broken.

Re:X11 will be around for quite a while yet

[Osgeld]

I agree, the "time to kill X" was in the mid 1990's when a Pentium could run OS/2 or Windows 95 with no problems but just loading an X desktop would suck all your ram and take an hour

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Re:Who cares about KDE anymore?

[couchslug]

Who needs KDE to use Linux?

Desktops are like browsers. When their developers are overcome by hubris one can always jump ship to something else.

Use a couple-three different desktops and you'll always be ready as well as more flexible.

Broken multi-monitor support

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to work well years ago, but now has turned into a fiasco between Xrandr and Xinerama. Before Xrandr showed up, I had a working triple-monitor setup with Xinerama. There was some overhead due to Xinerama, but it was a perfectly usable setup with KDE3.5.
Now it is such a slow mess that I've given up on it and now just run KDE from inside a VM on a Win7 host.
GPU object support is rumored to fix Xrandr, but it never materializes.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[fnj]

No, that is plainly not what the poster said at all. Wayland is an attempt to change the whole display paradigm, rendering X obsolete as it is envisioned that no one will program to X's interface any more. X would still be supported as a stepchild, but if there are a diminishing number of programs that support it, it would before long become essentially useless.

Why can't wayland?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't Wayland run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display it on another? Why can't that functionality be added? I understand it's part of the fundamental architecture of a display server, but since Wayland isn't in use in the real world, there should still be time to make those changes. I agree that this functionality is important, and it would be a great oversight if Wayland didn't support it.

Re:Why can't wayland?

[diego.viola]

This functionality will be possible with networking protocols like RDP and SPICE. Don't worry, Wayland will use them and network transparency will be possible just like in X.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[WorBlux]

GTK 3.2+ has remote capibility, by translating to HTML interfaces.

Also the X sever has already been gutted quite a bit, Especially since it was modularized. For instance compositing managers have taken over windows management. Mode setting has being added to the kernel, memory management by separate things like G.E.M. Eventually X may just be used for legacy toolkits and remote windowing. If Wayland can properly support input mapping and swapping to/from X, I don't see why the remote capability through X could not be kept or even improved, A variation of X that only needed to know how to interpret the final Wayland outputs rather than having hundreds of device input drivers could make it pretty lean.

An interest presentation http://blip.tv/linuxconfau/x-and-the-future-of-linux-graphics-4711540

Re:X11 will be around for quite a while yet

[yourmommycalled]

Strange I had a Sparcstation 1 in the late 80's which had much less horsepower than a mid-90's pentium and not only did X11 start fast, I could compile X11, run X11, read netnews all at the same time no problems. Me thinks you're memory has more than just bit rot

Re:Who cares about KDE anymore?

[maxwell demon]

The problem is that desktop environments are more like browsers of the time of the browser wars. A KDE app is "best viewed with KDE" and a Gnome app is "best viewed with Gnome".

Wayland will be the Unity of graphic systems

[allo]

Cool, new, Ubuntu will use it and the users will hate it.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't "still run X applications" over the network now. I'd like a successor project fix the situation and make it possible to run X applications over the network.

Even modest VPN latencies of 30 ms slow down X applications so they are all but unusable. XTerm still works but emacs, eclipse and firefox take an eternity to load and respond to input. (Workaround for emacs: -nw. Workaround for firefox: squid. No workaround for eclipse???)

Some of these problems might be avoided with application and toolkit design fixes, but I believe many of them are inherent in the policy-less architecture of X11. That means a client will have to exchange pixmaps with the X11 server (themes, widget shapes, pictures, animated ads etc), and make endless strings of queries to the server ("How big would 'Hello' be pixelwise? I'd like to frame it with my fancy theme.")

I see two ways out: fix the policy or make it dynamic. Then, the X11 server would be responsible of the right looks of the widgets and would lay out the application just right. Or the application would upload a piece of executable code to implement the bells and whistles it requires and would like the server to administer for it.

This isn't about X11 vs Wayland

[Anonymous Coward]

This is about KDE supporting Wayland.

Not Wayland being superior/inferior.

Just KDE stepping it up and supporting more environments.

This is a good thing, no matter which side of the X11/Wayland fence you are on.

Re:This isn't about X11 vs Wayland

[diego.viola]

Agreed. I can't wait to use KDE on Wayland.

Re:X11 will be around for quite a while yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange. All I see is the correlation between linux market share and X being good enough for most uses.

Car Analogy Time

[jelle]

Wayland not having a network transport is like a new cadillac model not being sold in Texas. You know, it won't take a miracle to make it happen.

I've used X since the dark ages myself, but that doesn't mean something new can't be better, and I do know X has its limitations.

Re:X11 will be around for quite a while yet

[jjohn_h]

>>>
The "problem" with replacing X is that it's good enough for most uses.
>>>

Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera do not use X. Problem solved.

Re:X11 will be around for quite a while yet

[Osgeld]

hm I happen to be writing an article about linux on old machines, one target is my old 90Mhz pentium 90 with 8 megs of ram, with linux 2.4 kernel and a fairly (but not tweaked out I will give you that) spartan setup, before I even hit the login prompt most of that ram is gone, start X and your working almost totally on swap, and it takes about 30 minuets to get to a usable point, it never really stops thrashing the swap manager and god help you if your dumb enough to toss on a light window manager.

So OK you remember a SPARCstation 1, and it was the shit, I can buy that as it was running a proper unix, it was designed for that reason and it had some corporate support behind it. Thats a bit different than getting some distro, and slapping it on a random machine.

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[account_deleted]

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Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean resolution can change on the fly? What ever shall we do?
</snark>

Re:Oh noes!

[Short Circuit]

Do you mean resolution can change on the fly? What ever shall we do?
</snark>

No, I'm talking about display depth. Resolution changing on the fly wouldn't have been a problem.

Re:X11 will be around for quite a while yet

[marcosdumay]

Indeed. Now it is time to upgrade X, not ditch it. That extra functionality that "just 1 or 2% of the users ever see"* doesn't put any big load on machines anymore, why work into not having it?

Now would be a nearly perfect time to make the X protocol more friendly to WANs, by including more modern hight level primitives on it.

* Translation: Our developers think people should work on their machines, not remotely. That is a funny line of tougth comming from Red Hat, but it explains why they don't care at all that GUI software is overwritting standard configuration files, while not giving you any hint for CLI based configuration. They really expect you to be physicaly present at your server, or are they trying to do desktops now?

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[marcosdumay]

"GTK 3.2+ has remote capibility, by translating to HTML interfaces."

That, and I'd like to point that my impression is (but I'm hardly an specialist) that the toolkit is the best point to implement network transparence. The only layer where it would make better use of the network would be the actual application, but then it would be too expensive.

No wayland, improve X

[maestroX]

Wayland offers way less than X. Wayland is way behind in stability. X11 features i'd like to see:

• embedded widgets ala NeWS without the postscript, with GL?
• good GL support for newer cards (nouveau et al), gl default, nice fallback to bitmap ops based on hardware features.
• drop legacy libs (already isolated) like the *beep* resources files.
• internet db with downloadable profiles for cards/monitors and lcms.
• better API
• dbus integration for communication i.e. dnd
• a refurbished xterm with readable source code.
• integrate cairo, to get X on my printer
• save/restore windows
• no restart between xdm/gdm/etc and user session
• proper sleep like macbooks do, good laptop support (not only X)
• xsnow default windowmanager.

Since the transfer to xorg a lot has been improved! Kudos to K Packard and friends!

Re:No wayland, improve X

[serviscope_minor]

dbus integration for communication i.e. dnd

Why? What is wrong with xdnd?

different approach

[Anonymous Coward]

My question is why we should replace one layer cake with another? X definitely adds some nice modularity to the desktop, but at what price? Most users don't want to send their windows across the network. They are happy surfing the net, playing some games or writing a document. Simple stuff, nothing more. To put it to the extreme: look at ChromeOS.

So why don't we make the compositor work without all the layers (X or Wayland) in between???
I heard that Apple was quite successful with that concept. At least they are dominating the *nix desktop.
BTW who would want to run a ssh server to get a local shell?

Re:different approach

[Homburg]

Wayland pretty much is "the compositor without all the layers in between." See this description of the Wayland architecture.

Wayland!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't Wayland that company in the Alien films?

Re:Wayland!

[Anonymous Coward]

Weyland-Yutani

Re:X11 will be around for quite a while yet

[osu-neko]

Strange I had a Sparcstation 1 in the late 80's which had much less horsepower than a mid-90's pentium and not only did X11 start fast, I could compile X11, run X11, read netnews all at the same time no problems. Me thinks you're memory has more than just bit rot

I think you might be suffering from the "megahertz myth". As and old SPARCstation user myself, I know you're quite right that my old IPC could run X11 just fine. That didn't alter the fact that a modern Pentium a few years later groaned under the stress of trying to do what my old SPARC did. The IPC was a much lower megahertz machine, I'll grant, but it didn't seem to have "much less horsepower" than the Pentium I picked up half a decade later.

We might be comparing apples and oranges, though. Part of the problem might have been a mature and well implemented X server running under SunOS vs. a fresh open-source X running under Linux back in the day when Slackware was king. It's not exactly the same software, as well as not the same computers being compared. All I know for sure is X11 and many graphical apps ran much faster on my IPC than on mid-90's Pentium.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[mdmkolbe]

With "Wayland and X", your Wayland native apps don't get network transparency. This is fail.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[diego.viola]

Fail is your comment.

You will get network transparency if you want if you run Wayland with RDP/SPICE/whatever-network-transparency-protocol you want.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[diego.viola]

Also GTK3 already has a HTML5 backend that allows you to send GTK to a browser, and more backends for network transparency could be added to toolkits like Qt/GTK.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[diego.viola]

It's about damn time, I can't wait to run KDE on Wayland, and most apps for that matter (mplayer, vlc, etc). Without any X at all.

Re:Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibilit

[diego.viola]

"It's stupid. It's basically throwing away _the_ biggest advantage of the linux desktop"

Yeah right, like if the Linux desktop is used by most of the world population, and like if the people who want to have a nice desktop and browse the web are interested to run their applications remotely. Get off of your mother basement and face the reality. Linux will never succeed with that abomination called Xorg. A change is needed and welcome, and that is Wayland.

I'm not sure you understand this

[LostMyBeaver]

X is a series of APIs which for the most part manages rectangular regions within a display context and provides a series of accelerated functions such as line drawing and text drawing. With the support of things like XVideo, it even supports exposure of a video card frame buffer for rendering directly to a graphics context. Nearly all the features of X which you're explaining are related to X's ability to serialize data for transport over a bidirectional character device allowing the graphics context to exist on another screen.

Wayland does not necessarily lack support for these features. They just haven't reached the point of maturity which is found in X. In order to compensate for that, an application designed to function using Wayland can make use of a Wayland X11 backend to render similarly to what you're describing. In the context of remoting, where all data is serialized and deserialized (though in local instances, shared memory might be used), the functionality as far as you see it should be unchanged. You should still be able to pipe through SSH tunnels using X11 for example. The expected performance hit should be negligible if at all measurable depending on the X11 back end. If the Full context has to be rendered using wayland and then rerendered to X11, performance may take a tiny hit, though for operations like font management, font switching etc... it could actually be faster. On the other hand, if the Wayland X11 back end is written well (and I'll imagine that it is), then there should be no performance loss relating to how the data is serialized. If anything, it may be faster as Wayland could perform operations similar to how NCQ works on serial ATA to optimize the connect as it provides a small buffer between application and serialization.

So... the only short comings I see in Wayland at this point is that people don't quite understand it yet. I personally see Wayland as a welcome improvement. It finally will allow the majority of hacks in the form of X extensions to be managed and consolidated into a cleaner set of APIs. X11 was one of the easlier windowing APIs created and it was great for the most part as in modern terms it could be seen as a user mode API to the graphics adapter driver. But on the other hand, it is really very complex to accomplish even basic tasks on. Try setting the mini-icon for an application and you'll see what I mean. Wayland builds on what has been learned from a gazillion years of X development. Some people might suggest that it's too early to make the change, but no one is forcing anyone to upgrade from X11 to Wayland. Most people simply will because for most people it is definitely ready.

Oh... btw... no one actually codes for X11 directly anymore. We use Qt, GTK+ and a multitude of other windowing APIs. X11 itself doesn't actually offer APIs suitable for writing applications. That's why we had Xt and Motif. Theses days, we use more modern alternatives that simplify the development of custom widgets. But X itself is really just a transport layer.

You are not Keith Packard and he knows better

[dbIII]

I wasn't replying to Keith Packard but instead to somebody that doesn't know what they were talking about and then had the audacity to pretend that the words came from Keith Packard.
When I replied to your ignorant post before I was sitting at my home computer which has a different X server for each monitor (which lets me handle windows very differently on each screen) - and the left screen had a full screen game on it!.
So there you go - I was using X in a way you pretend it can't be used when I replied to your post.
I also remember running openoffice fullscreen when it first came out under that name. In fact it looks like it's been possible to run applications fullscreen in X back before linux was released.

I don't know where you got this incorrect idea but anyone you name drop is going to know better.

Keith didn't write that post did he?

[dbIII]

I'm sure Keith Packard knows a lot of things the above idiot does not and can't help it if the above idiot doesn't understand him and makes up shit like "X is unable to support full-screen games".

Wayland & Network at GSoC

[DrYak]

Pule & X: There was some efforts trying to get application "hot moveable" between X servers. (Xnest being among them) sadly none of the universal solution is currently popular or very maintained. Meanwhile some tool-kits like GTK give the possibility to move their application between X server.

Now to get back to Wayland: The reasons for wayland is that the way X Server works doesn't map to the way modern applications are drawn nor composited on screen.
Wayland is designed to expose the lower-level functions in a way that makes sense for a modern desktop.
Now it *is true* that currently Wayland has no remote display capabilites.

BUT there's a Google Summer of Code project to bring network support to wayland in a transparent way :
The current idea is that on one machine, there will be a mini wayland-like server which consumes graphic buffers generated by local applications, but instead of compositing them with OpenGL ES on screen (like a normal server) it will stream them over the network to the target machine where a local wayland-like client will send the graphics to the real local Wayland server, to be composited on-screen.

So, by the time KDE 5.0 offers wayland support, you'll probably have support for Wayland forwarding. Probably even in openssh by then.