Update On Wayland and X11 Support

Phoronix was at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and has two articles on the status of Wayland and X11 integration. The second talk was about the current status of Wayland, and its impending release (version 1.0 is due this summer). The developers also have an experimental GNOME-Shell working on Wayland. There's a (kind of shaky) video of this talk (attached, and at youtube for those wanting the html5 version). The first talk (by Keith Packard) covered X11 support on Wayland. It's basically ready to go, but window management is implemented only as a hack right now. The next year could be quite exciting for GNU/Linux and BSD users as distributions begin including Wayland as an alternative to X.org.

Comments

Wayland vs X

[sick_em]

Okay so I understand the whole desire to toss out X and it's extreme amount of legacy code, but Wayland to me seems like even at version 1 will be crippled compared to X. The no network transparency I can handle (just barely), but no apps that require full OpenGL? I've tinkered around with OpenGL ES in the past and it does not seem like an acceptable substitute when you need full OpenGL. Why are distros planning on adopting it so quickly? Are these flaws that normal users would not notice or care about?

Re:Wayland vs X

[Urban Garlic]

This.

Network transparency is huge -- I often need to run graphical installers for commercial software, or run graphical diagnostic software, on systems that live in my machine room, and have fairly basic video cards, and in any case don't routinely have graphical displays attached.

The really-right answer to this, of course, is to separate the display from the the installer and/or diagnostic executable, and connect over a network socket or something, but in practice this doesn't happen. In practice, I connect via SSH with the X session forwarded, and run the graphical app that way.

The loss of network transparency makes remote access much more complicated. It's not lethal, there are things you can do with remote desktop viewers that work, but you end up hacking together a rickety, insecure new solution to what used to be a solved problem -- it really doesn't feel like progress.

Wayland is a huge step backwards.

[Anonymous Coward]

To start with: the best wayland-related comment of all time appeared right here on slashdot:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2699657&cid=39198273

Second, please note that all comments in this post are regarding unix or linux as a desktop operating system as opposed to HPC or server-based usage.

Now to move on: Currently the only wayland compositor implementation is weston. Weston requires kms, which makes it pragmatically linux-only, and it also requires udev, which makes it *actually* linux-only. To compound the problem, the developers are talking about integrating it with systemd. When asked how that will affect porting efforts, developer response was along the lines of "just port systemd to bsd."

Wayland is meant to replace x.org entirely, but it simply replaces the overcomplicated xorg ecosystem with an overcomplicated mess of build-time dependencies while removing all of the features that have kept x11 on top. To make the whole situation an absolute joke, x11 integration is regarded as the most important part of wayland's code.

Fedora and Ubuntu want to switch to Wayland entirely. This is another in a series of awful interface decisions that have lead to things like Linux Mint and Scientific Linux creeping up and taking userbase away from what have been powerhouses. What I can't figure out is why no overarching community has arisen among the 'conservative' linux users. There's clearly a lot of backlash to the ridiculous things going on at freedesktop.org -- xcb, wayland, systemd, journald, et al -- but there seems to be no alternative standards committee coalescing... and that will be the death of linux as an alternative for power users.

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Re:Why?

[TheGratefulNet]

you've just described me. I run fvwm 1.4 and I open a term window (whatever is the current default from the distro I have) and I run things. env DISPLAY has stuff and if I run an X app, a window comes up. the window mgr lets me move windows and iconify them. what the hell else do you want/need?

I believe in things being as lean as possible and having to prove or justify any excess. since the old DECwindows days, I've run essentially the same style of window mgr and 'xterms' work basically the same as they did 30yrs ago. you type in them, you can mouse in/out of them, you can scroll them. the paradigm has not changed, really, at all, in all these years.

I cannot justify a 'desktop'. I run a window mgr and windows come up as terms or apps and that's that. runs very fast and bug-free and stays up for months (and years) at a time.

I don't quite get the need to have to add complexity to what does not need it.

(oblig GOML)

tl;dr? 60 FPS on an embedded GPU!

[WilliamBaughman]

Discussions of Wayland on Slashdot tend to be all about a lack of network forwarding or missing features, so I think I'll share some of the positive things I expect to see from Wayland:

• Fewer CPU cycles spent in the graphics stack, shortening time to sleep
• Less memory used by the graphics stack
• More efficient compositing, meaning less memory bandwidth used in memcpy routines, lowering DRAM power and greatly improving speed in certain scenarios
• A graphics stack that's fast enough to get 60 FPS scrolling on an embedded GPU

I'm not aware of any X.org implementation that's gotten 60 FPS on an embedded GPU. That's not me trying to knock X.org, say anyone should stop using it, or say people need to "upgrade" to Wayland before it's feature-complete. That's me recognizing the reality of X.org not being "one size fits all" in a world where embedded or mobile Linux (think Android) outsells (and out-deploys) Linux on big core 10 or maybe 100-to-1.

Disclaimer: A big part of my job of performance optimization of applications on Linux running on mobile devices.

Re:Why?

[jbolden]

Wayland is actually simpler than X. That being said, I think it will be a very very long time, like a generation minimum, till X.org doesn't have an X for Linux. As far as games Wayland is a pure advantage.