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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?"
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!