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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.
IIRC X11 has a lot of redundancy with stuff that's already in the Linux kernel. Weyland is a compositing window manager that removes those redundancies for better performance and code maintainability. Weyland loads X11 legacy support only as needed on an app by app basis. Benefits include Compiz working much better by bypassing X.
They should get you to write their web site. I clicked the link, and after reading the summary on the first page, I still didn't have any idea WTF it was for...
Okay so I understand the whole desire to toss out X and it's extreme amount of legacy code
Why? What part of "legacy code" automatically means "toss [it] out"? The Linux kernel is over 20 years old, and the core BSD code is older than that. Do you also want to just throw them out and start over from scratch because they're old? Now, I agree with you that something that is less functional than its predecessor should not be adopted as its replacement, but I hate the assumption that "old == replace from scratch" that seems to be common in software development (especially in the open source/free software community).
I have tools in my toolbox that belonged to my grandfather, and my father has tools from his grandfather (100+ years old). We still use them because they work. We have other tools that we've bought to perform other tasks, but the old tools are not replaced just because they are old.
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.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
One of the features that always distinguished X from other display systems like Mac and Windows has been network transparency. You can ssh to another Linux system, start an X application, and that X application will appear on the system you ssh'd from. This is immensely useful and evidence of a well-thought-out design, but it's an afterthought to Wayland. They say they might be able to render to a VNC server, but VNC works like crap and is full-desktop forwarding rather than individual window forwarding.
It's extremely ironic that when X was created in the 80s they recognized the importance of distributed systems and network transparency, but now it's 2012, the Internet and the cloud is king, yet network transparency isn't a core feature.
All this because you can't cross-fade when switching VTs in X or have a "rotating cube" animation (see "Is wayland replacing the X server").
Benefits include Compiz working much better by bypassing X.
Those who would surrender basic functionality for eye candy deserve neither.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Downsides include not having any kind of network transparency or remote desktop support. Even supporting something like VNC on top of it would require a lot of internal changes and probably kernel-level support code too, and the developers basically consider this Someone Else's Problem.
What you don't understand is that Linux might be 20 years old, but what you call "Linux" today is almost incomprehensible compared to the original Linux other than both being mostly UNIX-like. The same cannot be said of X which is still adhering to a basic protocol that is over 20 years old and was designed long before anything that remotely resembles a modern GPU had come into existence. That's why large portions of the X server are *already being bypassed* by modern programs to give you halfway decent performance. Did you know that the large majority of graphically intensive applications (like everything using Cairo) are basically just shoving bitmap images across the X server now instead of trying to use the ancient and convoluted drawing commands that were cool in the 1980's but haven't been useful in a long time? X needs to go away.
Oh... and don't get me started about network transparency either. X's network transparency SUCKS over anything other than a gigabit LAN *and* you can't disconnect from X and resume the same GUI application on another device like any decent remote GUI system should allow (e.g. why the hell can't I start a remote GUI program on my PC then shift the same program it to my smartphone and keep working on it? The reason is that X's network protocol is *not* the be-all end-all that many people think it is). If X's network transparency was so awesome then NX would never have come into existence.
He didn't say everything that's legacy should "automatically" be thrown out. But X has a huge amount of cruft nobody uses anymore. Nobody actually writes towards Xlib, they use a toolkit. Nobody uses the orignal font functionality and descriptors, the bitmap fonts, the pixel-based rendering primitives, the image system that has no less than three different ways of storing an image (ximage, xpixbuf, xpixmap), that distinguish drawable and non-drawable images, depending on where they're stored. Et cetera. It's not thread-safe either.
Nobody is using the core X functionality, it's all outdated and largely replaced. The one redeeming feature of X - the network transparency, isn't that 'transparent' (again, the API distinguishes server-side and client-side stuff). Nor does it support modern stuff like drag-and-drop, and cut-and-paste has always been inconsistent (highlight-middle-click not being the same as the desktop or application's cut-and-paste buffer). Since nobody's using the core libraries anymore, the network transparency in X mostly consists of it passing events and bitmaps back and forth, something a simpler protocol like VNC can do just as well if not better.
In short, people don't need any of the things that are unique to X, and the things people actually use X for can be done better without it. It's a big load of cruft that exists for backwards-compatibility purposes only. Which is why it's entirely the correct decision to dump X11 and relegate X11 support to a compatbility library, so we don't need to have stuff held back and complicated by these legacy designs.
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."
This is a prime example of Linux developers doing "Embrace, extend, extinguish" on Unix. "We're dominant - let's lock everything down to our solution, and force anybody else to play catchup."
It may not be particularly intentional to damage other systems - having Linux blinders on, it's easy to see "All the world's a Linux machine", just like it used to be "All the world's a VAX" and "All the world's a Windows machine" - but it does the same kind of damage as if it was intentional.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.