Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland in Quantal Quetzal

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Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland in Quantal Quetzal

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 10, 2012 @02:10AM from the hard-to-please-everyone dept.

jones_supa writes "While there's still more than one month until the Ubuntu 12.10 feature freeze, Ubuntu developers continue to work towards their tight schedule of having Wayland serve as the compositor for the Quantal Quetzal release due out in October. Canonical's intends to provide smooth transitions from boot to shutdown. Wayland is also used for session switching and other operations, avoiding traditional VT switching, providing a consistent monitor layout, using the greeter as the lock screen, ensuring that locked sessions are actually secure from displaying, and showing the greeter while the session loads. Phoronix remains skeptical about Ubuntu making the deadline."

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Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by xxxJonBoyxxx · 2012-07-10 02:22 · Score: 2, Interesting

>> Will applications need to be rewritten or modified to work on Wayland? Yes. (From TFA.)
As a developer, I'm about to get off the Ubuntu train. Every major release recently has required tweaking the UI (e.g., tray icon behavior changes). I'm not really looking forward to another migration, especially when there are Red Hat and SUSE users (who tend to buy more) who are looking for things too.
1. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by DeathToBill · 2012-07-10 02:32 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  Although the more detailed answer is that GTK/Qt apps will need recompiling with an updated library. If you use X11 directly, then you have more work - except that you can also run an X server within Wayland to support native X11 clients.
  I've been impressed for some time with how well the Wayland developers have thought about backwards compatibility. X11 needs replacing; complaining that its different to X11 doesn't help solve the problems.
  
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2. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by babai101 · 2012-07-10 02:37 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  All of the X apps will remain compatible as they will also run an Xserver instance on top of wayland, it will not be that much PITA for the devs.
3. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by LordLimecat · 2012-07-10 03:05 · Score: 2
  
  Ubuntu is the best thing to happen to Linux for all of us who dont use Linux. Its users have been faithfully beta testing for everyone else for the last 6 years :P
  (For the record, if I was to switch my primary desktop back to Linux, theres a good chance it would be Ubuntu-- life is an adventure)
4. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Dog-Cow · 2012-07-10 03:12 · Score: 1
  
  How is that even remotely (pun not really intended) true?
5. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by snadrus · 2012-07-10 03:33 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Sure. X11 needs replacing because its hardware acceleration is worse than Wayland. X11 is actually many programs acting like layers: window mgr, compositor, greeter, locker, etc will be only 1 under Wayland. And still the design is simpler than any one. It's not that the code is being added, but that a no-longer-useful X11-style abstraction is being let-go.
  
  --
  Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
6. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by GameboyRMH · 2012-07-10 03:36 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Can't blame you, Ubuntu just can't stop jumping sharks...if only they could have stuck to being a normal fucking desktop distro, not only would Ubuntu be much more popular, but desktop Linux would be as well. When they moved the window control buttons to the left they had already gone off the deep end.
  
  --
  "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
7. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by devent · 2012-07-10 03:56 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  X11 needs to be replaced? Like my roof needs to be replaced because it works and have no holes in it? But it is old, I think about 15 years, so yeah it needs to be replaced.
  X11 is old, but it works. I can have multiple monitors just fine, 3D effects are working fast, games are working. Also, it is supported by all hardware vendors like AMD, Nvidia, Intel. Also I have network transparency with no additional costs. Multi-User works just fine with very easy Ctrl+Alt+F1 up to F12. I don't know why you want something else. In KDE there is also a user switcher GUI way. Boot is smooth in Fedora 14, 15 and 16.
  As long as there are no drivers from AMD, NVidia and Intel, Wayland will be a wet dream of a few developers. I do not need to go back to the time where the only graphics mode was Framebuffer. My impression is from the Ubuntu developers that they like some kids who are just pushing things like they want without any though about anything. Just to be different or "cool".
  First the totally unnecessary changes in Gnome with the Close/Minimize buttons; then the not usable Unity; and now the Wayland, which will be usable only after more 5 years in development and testing.
  
  --
  http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
8. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 04:12 · Score: 1
  
  Also, it is supported by all hardware vendors like AMD, Nvidia, Intel.
  This. You need to be modded up. The only graphics vendor on board with Wayland is Intel.
9. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by DeathToBill · 2012-07-10 04:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  X11 is more like a roof that was originally a 40-foot timber yacht. You've turned it upside down and fixed it to the tops of the walls. Gradually, over the years, you've patched in the holes until it only leaks when the wind is in the West. You've figured out how to get a flue up through the thing. You've nailed a TV antenna to it, and sealed around the cable with silicone. When you put it there you never bothered to take the decks out, so it's almost impossible to get into and work on and the structural elements, optimised rather for the sea than for housing, make it not very useful for storage. You still have to repaint it with pretty expensive paint every five years or so, else it starts to rot, and for some reason it attracts lots of confused-looking seagulls.
  Anyway, look at all the features! It's got a winged keel, a 200hp diesel engine, and a gorgeous timber and brass wheel. All the fittings are marine-grade stainless, the rigging was all almost brand-new when you installed the thing and in her day she'd do 27kt reaching across a good wind. Don't actually use much of that any more, of course, but still...
  Technically the keel still violates local planning ordinance, and technically it still smells quite a bit of fish. But it's been there for 15 years and it works. There's no need to replace it.
  What's that love? You want to build an extension? Ah.
  
  --
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10. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by DeathToBill · 2012-07-10 04:31 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  And, in case you missed some of the metaphor there, the basic problem with X11 as a display system for desktop systems today is that none of the apps written for it actually use X11. Your multiple monitors work because of Xrandr - which isn't part of X11. Your 3D effects work by bypassing the X server and making OpenGL calls - not part of X11. It's supported by all the hardware vendors - and most of that support is in kernel drivers, not in the X server itself. VT switching works... more... or... less... until you'd actually like to switch VT before you get back from your coffee break, or your X server doesn't recover correctly. And, in case you missed it, they're not provided by X11. And I'm not sure what boot times have to do with it?
  Your apps draw using Cairo or similar, not X11. They draw onto a buffer provided by the compositing extension, not X11. The buffer gets put into video memory by the compositor, not X11.
  So why exactly are we keeping X11 hanging around? Why not get rid of it and halve the size of the display server code base, making it much easier to program against in the process? Why are we carting around a heuge amount of code that is of no modern relevance except to be able to claim that it is an X server? The maintenance burden of the current X server is too much and any thought of adding new capabilities horrific.
  Otherwise, your arguments amount to, "No-one supports it yet so it's a waste of time." Good on Canonical for pushing it - if anyone has a vague chance of getting vendors to support it, it seems they might.
  
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11. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Hatta · 2012-07-10 04:44 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Although the more detailed answer is that GTK/Qt apps will need recompiling with an updated library. If you use X11 directly, then you have more work - except that you can also run an X server within Wayland to support native X11 clients.
  So what's to happen to our decades worth of work in innovative and configurable window managers? Am I expected to run an X server on top of Wayland just so I can keep the Fluxbox config I've grown accustomed to?
  Choice of window manager is one of the best reasons to use a UNIX desktop. As I understand it, Wayland eliminates this choice entirely.
  X11 needs replacing
  Citation needed.
  
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  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
12. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Hatta · 2012-07-10 04:46 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Why not get rid of it and halve the size of the display server code base, making it much easier to program against in the process?
  Can you do this without sacrificing functionality? If so, do it. If not, you're writing Wayland.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
13. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 04:54 · Score: 1
  
  network transparency. Without this, wayland can go diaf.
14. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by nko321 · 2012-07-10 04:56 · Score: 1
  
  You can get an X server for Windows. Last I checked (years ago), Mac OS X was distributed with an X server on the install CD. I'm guessing that providing an X server in Wayland can't be hard... though admittedly, I've read no articles.
15. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by jedidiah · 2012-07-10 05:12 · Score: 1
  
  Even if I were OK with the MacOS style approach to dealing with remote desktop requirements, I would still be faced with the problem of my hardware vendor not supporting Wayland. Until that happens, Wayland a complete non-starter.
  That driver might not "use X" but I still benefit greatly from it.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
16. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by serviscope_minor · 2012-07-10 05:14 · Score: 2
  
  Have you ever tried them? They're shit, basically.
  Native windows don't get X11 support, so can't be remoted, etc.
  X11 apps don't integrate properly so things like drag and drop, and even copy/paste with something other than text between X and native programs doesn't work.
  Oh, and you can't use any of the excellent window managers for X to manage your native windows.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
17. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by jedidiah · 2012-07-10 05:16 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Wayland apps are like Mac apps. They have no native remote desktop capability. You have to use a 3rd party hack like VNC to get such a feature.
  I've seen how VNC runs on a Mac. Not impressed.
  Running X on a Mac won't let me run iTunes across the network. The same is true of Windows.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
18. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by allo · 2012-07-10 05:31 · Score: 1
  
  i am using ubuntu on the desktop, and are experimenting with distros on the notebook.
  The latest one i installed there is the current fedora. Its a real nice distro.
  Ah, and just for the record: of course with KDE both machines, because unity and gnome3 are both a mess.
19. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Hatta · 2012-07-10 05:52 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  From the FAQ: "The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process."
  The Wayland window manager will be built in. If you want to change your window manager, you have to change the display system itself.
  Particularly egregious is the choice to have Wayland clients provide window decorations. That means that no matter what window manager you have compiled into Wayland, you can't centrally control the appearance of your desktop.
  What happens if I want to use a Wayland distribution that provides a tiling window manager, but my apps are coded with window decorations? What happens if I want to use Fluxbox's built in window tabbing, but none of the clients support that?
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
20. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 06:01 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Welcome to *nix. You must be new here.
  I rather like that the window manager, greeter, and locker are separate processes. I can replace them. I can mix and match according to my taste. I could even write my own if I wanted. This is the Unix way.
  Example: you probably use some ubuntu-y, gnomey, kde kind of bullshit. That's fine for you but I have different tastes. So I use xdm to log in, wmaker to manage windows, and xscreensaver to lock my screen. Result: my X11 install is several hundred megabytes smaller than yours. But if I want your setup it's just a small apt-get away. This diversity, choice, and flexibility are why I like the *nix desktop in the first place.
  But if I read you correctly, you want it to be all 1 big monolithic process? What is it, you're concerned about context switches between these processes on today's hardware? What the hell planet are you from? The X design has worked well for decades on much less powerful hardware than I have in my pocket today. X works fine on all of my devices, just like it did in the 90s, just like it does on my Nokia N900 running at 600mhz. I will be sticking with X for the time being.
21. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Medievalist · 2012-07-10 06:33 · Score: 2
  
  When they moved the window control buttons to the left they had already gone off the deep end.
  Man, I have to agree; that does seem to have been the shark-jump moment, doesn't it? Up until then it seems like Canonical had good solid technical or ergonomic reasons for nearly everything they did.
22. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by GameboyRMH · 2012-07-10 06:48 · Score: 1
  
  There were little hints that they were losing focus before that - replacing the old app manager GUI with the new Software Center garbage that only let you perform one operation at a time is one that stands out - but that was the first big thing they did horribly wrong and it's all been downhill from there.
  
  --
  "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
23. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by BlackSupra · 2012-07-10 06:56 · Score: 1
  
  Great analogy!
24. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by hairyfeet · 2012-07-10 08:10 · Score: 2
  
  But Ubuntu is for home users, how many home users are running remote desktops? You've got all this stuff that frankly isn't need for the ones the OS is being pushed for, and which makes them system more brittle (see the classic rant from thom at OSNews about how X crashed when doing simple tasks for a loooong list of people having trouble with it in the home user space) so why not simply let X be for servers and Wayland be for home users? Choice is good, right?
  
  --
  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
25. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by hairyfeet · 2012-07-10 08:38 · Score: 2
  
  I'll get hate for pointing this out but moving the buttons without any real reason is a classic case of cargo cult usability where you change something to mimic something else without understanding the WHY it is the way it is. We are seeing the same thing in windows with the upcoming windows 8, where someone at MSFT said " Nobody buys our cell phones, people buy our desktops, if we make them both alike people will buy both!" without even bothering to find out WHY cell phones are designed the way they are (hint, its the screen size) and instead simply trying to mimic the look.
  
  --
  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
26. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Hatta · 2012-07-10 09:01 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  But Ubuntu is for home users, how many home users are running remote desktops?
  How many home users are using the command line? Why don't we rip that out too?
  You've got all this stuff that frankly isn't need for the ones the OS is being pushed for, and which makes them system more brittle
  What evidence is there that network transparency causes X to be "brittle"?
  see the classic rant from thom at OSNews about how X crashed when doing simple tasks for a loooong list of people having trouble with it in the home user space
  Sounds like a driver problem, not an X problem. He has a point in that X should be able to handle driver problems more gracefully, but I don't see what this has to do with network transparency. Can't we have both network transparency, server side window decorations, and robustness against driver faults?
  why not simply let X be for servers and Wayland be for home users? Choice is good, right?
  Fragmentation is bad for choice. If I want to use a certain app, I have to use the display platform that app is written for. And there is no bright line between server software and home software, so anyone who isn't an average user(and on average, almost everyone is not average) is going to be locked out of using some software.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
27. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Dr_Barnowl · 2012-07-10 09:03 · Score: 1
  
  I detect a note of sarcasm....
  The way I see it, is .. what's the first thing you do when you close an app? Open another one.
  In both old GNOME 2 and Unity, the button to open a new app is top left of the screen. So when you close an app with a top-left button, your pointer is now very close to where it needs to be to open a new one.
  Windows puts the button to close an app, and the button to open one in opposite corners. Think of the extra mouse miles! I'm not sure what OS X does but it looks like you have to at least cross the vertical distance of the screen. Maybe that's why the fad for losing vertical resolution has come about..
28. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Dr_Barnowl · 2012-07-10 09:06 · Score: 2
  
  Yeah, and not being able to install Synaptic to get those advanced features back is a real bummer. Oh, wait...
  They made a choice to save the disk space so they could put in a more noob-friendly package manager. Which lets you buy stuff. And fund the development of the OS which the rest of us freetards get for nothing. Whereas for those of us that miss Synaptic, we have to *endure* typing one command. Or installing it with the Software Centre, if we like irony. That sure is 30 seconds I'll never get back...
29. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Medievalist · 2012-07-10 09:41 · Score: 1
  
  The Dvorak keyboard has not yet triumphed over QWERTY, so I think moving well-known buttons for efficiency is pretty close to a dead argument, at least outside the Apple fanbase.
  In my case, the first thing I do when I close an app is close another one. And then, when all twenty or thirty SSH sessions are closed, I hit ctl-alt-delete, click shutdown and go get a beer. But that's obviously just one person's use case. Some people like cupcakes better - but I, for one, care less for them.
30. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by lennier · 2012-07-10 09:45 · Score: 1
  
  Ubuntu is the best thing to happen to Linux for all of us who dont use Linux. Its users have been faithfully beta testing for everyone else for the last 6 years :P
  Just so. Except for about the last 3 years, we've been nagging Canonical as a beta group saying "hey, these changes you're making aren't working, nobody likes them, it was better in the previous release, pls fix" and they all come back with "WONTFIX. Ever. Your brain is wrong. I am as a god among developers! I went into SPACE! Muhahaha! Sincerely, M. Shuttleworth."
  
  --
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31. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by lennier · 2012-07-10 09:51 · Score: 1
  
  In both old GNOME 2 and Unity, the button to open a new app is top left of the screen. So when you close an app with a top-left button, your pointer is now very close to where it needs to be to open a new one.
  In other words, the difference between clicking "Open New App" and "Close this other unrelated open window and destroy all my unsaved data in it" is about three pixels, or a half-millisecond twitch in your fine motor control finger muscles. That's not a feature.
  
  --
  You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
32. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by HuguesT · 2012-07-10 10:13 · Score: 1
  
  Interesting analogy, but false.
  X11 is more like a concrete-film roof: a brilliantly engineered, but difficult technology. It is also expensive as hell to build, impossible to work over, imposes the size of the house that can go under it rather than the other way around, it also really ugly, and installing the satellite antenna on top was hard and dangerous work. However, come hail or stone or even a small meteorite, this roof will withstand it all.
  I'm on OSX for various reasons, but I find that my X11 server is always running. Why? because various pieces of software require it. Most crucially, distant access to Linux and BSD compute servers. NX compresses the protocol, and there is no other game in town at any price.
33. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by M1FCJ · 2012-07-10 10:53 · Score: 1
  
  and Fedora is different in which way... I have two words. Gnome 3.
34. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by M1FCJ · 2012-07-10 10:56 · Score: 1
  
  I don't know, using the good old TWM all I had to do was click on the screen and then select xterm and that was that. I could also browse through the options but never had the urge to drag my trackball around the desk to get to the top (or the bottom) left (or right) corner and it always worked fine. Try it one day, you might like it.
35. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by GameboyRMH · 2012-07-10 11:24 · Score: 1
  
  I'm not talking about Synaptic, I'm talking about the old applications manager. You used to access it by going to Applications -> Add/Remove Applications. The package name was gnome-app-install.
  
  --
  "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
36. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by markjhood2003 · 2012-07-10 12:15 · Score: 1
  
  I've been reading all the comments, and it wasn't until I read the parent here that it finally hit me: Wayland integrates the window manager.
  This is an amazing leap backward. And on top of that, clients must provide their own window decorations? I can't even imagine what this will do to UI consistency, usability, and appearance.
37. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by unixisc · 2012-07-10 15:15 · Score: 1
  
  At this point, both Qt5 and Unity are being written to include Wayland support. Why would they bother if Wayland already has and only allows one Window manager? Or is there something I'm missing?
  I know what X looks like when run just by itself. What does Wayland look like?
38. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by RogerWilco · 2012-07-10 20:09 · Score: 1
  
  Over here in radio astronomy, there actually are quite a few people who still use Linux or the X11 in OSX to run old unix software. I mean stuff like Miriad, built on the original Xaw/Athena in the middle of the eighties.
  I don't know their code in detail, so I can't say if it does bypass some of the X11 functions, but given that is was developed mostly the X window system reached version 11, I think it's pretty basic X.
  There's also AIPS, which is even older. I don't think it knows about X, it uses a serial stream of bytes, where each byte is a pixel, to display images on "AIPSTV". This is a program that still thinks in input/output/program tapes and has no concept of a file system beyond "tape library".
  What I learned when I ventured into radio astronomy, is that a lot of the software in use is still seventies and eighties FORTRAN code. Only recently, with the newer ALMA and LOFAR telescopes coming online, did more modern packages like CASA (1991) gain any traction.
  Yes 2 decades old is considered "new" in radio astronomy.
  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/mark/AIPS.html
  
  --
  RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
39. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by RogerWilco · 2012-07-10 20:26 · Score: 1
  
  Ad that's why so many find it hard to replicate the success of Apple, they don't understand that Apple has a very good reason for everything they do, even if it sometimes isn't the best idea. Even in the old MacOS the UI design was very good. I remember the first time I sat behind a Mac and was more productive within 15 minutes than the WinNT system I was used to.
  Technology and design wise Apple is one of the best. What most people don't like them for, is the fierce way they defend their image and brand. That's where they get really aggressive and a lot of people don't like that.
  MS tries with Metro and the ribbon and such, but I don't find it nearly as good as the UI designs that Apple puts out.
  
  --
  RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
40. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Barefoot+Monkey · 2012-07-10 21:04 · Score: 1
  
  From the FAQ: "The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process."
  From there it continues:
  You can think of Wayland as a toolkit for creating clients and compositors. It is not a specific single compositor or window manager. If you want a different window manager, you can write a new one.
  This may sound like a lot of work, but one of the key points about Wayland is that the boilerplate code to a Wayland compositor is comparable or less than the X boilerplate involved in becoming an X window manager and compositor. Bringing up EGL and GLES2 on the Linux KMS framebuffer and reading input from evdev can be done in less that a thousand lines of code. The Wayland server side library provides the protocol implementation and makes it easy to put the pieces together.
  So basically you can use any window manager provided that the manager is written to support Wayland, just as you can use any window manager on X provided that it supports X.
41. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by tehcyder · 2012-07-10 22:53 · Score: 1
  
  Yes 2 decades old is considered "new" in radio astronomy.
  So what? Actual scientists care about getting accurate results, not being on the right side in some fashion war.
  
  --
  To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
42. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by ancienthart · 2012-07-11 01:15 · Score: 1
  
  X11 isn't really the problem; the X.Org Foundation is. They have stopped listening to both the application developers and the end users. They seem to have the same problems as the Firefox development team, a few people in controlling positions with stronger wills than brains.
  And the same went for the Gimp team until about 3-4 years ago. I'm glad that they were able to get someone who was willing to restart work on GEGL, because I'm actually enjoying the latest gimp releases again.
43. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Hatta · 2012-07-11 01:33 · Score: 1
  
  Sure, all it takes is a recompile. And you still can't set your window decorations with your window manager, which is traditionally half the job a window manager does. That's a dramatic loss in flexability.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
44. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Hatta · 2012-07-11 01:36 · Score: 1
  
  The CLI is, and will always be the best way to interact with computers. Why? Because people have evolved to interact with language. CLIs are fundamentally more expressive than any GUI could ever be.
  You can have your toaster OS.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
45. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Barefoot+Monkey · 2012-07-11 02:32 · Score: 1
  
  Can you confirm that's actually the case? I don't know much about Wayland's technical details, but it's such a dramatic loss in flexibility that I'm inclined to suspect this being a complete misunderstanding. I can't see how code that runs on the compositing and window-management layer would be unable to add decoration unless it is restricted to an extremely limiting API (hopefully not what is happening), and even if that were so then wouldn't it be possible to have a decorator using the same reparenting technique that window managers use on X? And wouldn't it be possible to have window managers as precompiled shared objects which could be swapped during runtime?
  I guess I should look into Wayland and try to answer those questions for myself. I'd hate to be unable to change window managers on the fly or have apps needing to decorate their own windows.
46. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by Wolfrider · 2012-07-11 03:33 · Score: 1
  
  --I'm just curious, is this true for Cygwin as well?
  
  --
  .
  == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
47. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by DeathToBill · 2012-07-11 04:07 · Score: 1
  
  God, don't I know it - still supporting people writing new code in *Fortran 77* FFS. In Bristol, as it turns out.
  But that's a reason for backwards compatibility, not to refuse to change. Wayland explicitly supports existing X clients by running an X server, either rootless or windowed, as a Wayland client.
  What's the problem here?
  
  --
  Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
48. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by DeathToBill · 2012-07-11 04:11 · Score: 1
  
  Yes yes yes. Because you can write a far simpler X server as a Wayland client. It doesn't have to deal with anything to do with drivers or modes or depths - all it has to do is receive X11 traffic and translate it into drawing calls.
  
  --
  Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
49. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by DeathToBill · 2012-07-11 04:12 · Score: 1
  
  So we'll never try anything new ever again because no-one supports it yet?
  
  --
  Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
50. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by badkarmadayaccount · 2012-07-15 07:00 · Score: 1
  
  The head of the Wayland project is also lead developer of X11, on last year's linux.conf.au talks in Brisbane he detailed his reasons. I agree with Ubuntu's move, I don't agree with most everything they've done the last 5 years.
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
51. Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" by badkarmadayaccount · 2012-07-15 07:12 · Score: 1
  
  The apps use a toolkit like Qt, which usually sets decorations, and can be configured like the wm. IOW, just edit a different conf file, or equivalent. If the distro does it's job, the user won't notice the difference. What worries me is porting X11 wms. I hope a code generator is in the works.
  
  --
  I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
I have long dreamt of the day by kiriath · 2012-07-10 02:23 · Score: 2

That X would be replaced... and now after all this time? I'm not sure if I'm happy about it =\ It is very interesting to see that there is an effort in this area though, to be quite honest this is the first I am hearing of Wayland. Ubuntu seems to favor having one good release, and one less stable release. You have to get your bug fixing done somehow right?
1. Re:I have long dreamt of the day by Qwavel · 2012-07-10 02:36 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I have no comment on 'wayland good' versus 'wayland bad', but it is certainly a known quantity and it has been waiting in the wings to replace X for a while.
  As you said, the dream of replacing X has been around for a very long time. No one has done it because it is a ton of work and because the changes are bound to piss off some developers and users (see "pound sand" post above).
  I'm impressed that the Ubuntu folks are going to take this on and I wish them well. If they succeed then the rest of the distro's will probably follow suite.
2. Re:I have long dreamt of the day by kriston · 2012-07-10 02:40 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I agree. Wayland needs to happen. We've wasted so much time, effort, and knowledge keeping X Windows up and running. I sometimes think about how much further along desktop Linux might be if we threw off the shackles of X Windows years ago. There's a reason Android and MacOS do not use X Windows.
  
  --
  Kriston
3. Re:I have long dreamt of the day by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 03:00 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The Ubuntu folks aren't developing Wayland. Wayland is being developed pretty much entirely by Intel employees. Ubuntu is just planning to integrate it.
4. Re:I have long dreamt of the day by serviscope_minor · 2012-07-10 05:17 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  That's an awful lot of hyperbole in one post with no actual information.
  The thing that would be best would be X12, not scrapping X11 completely. There's lots of good and useful things in X, which Wayland doesn't have.
  Oh, and by the way, please, if you want OSX or Android, you know where to buy them so go and do so. Stop trying to turn my very nice desktop system into an inferior commercial alternative.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
5. Re:I have long dreamt of the day by markjhood2003 · 2012-07-10 12:33 · Score: 1
  
  Android doesn't use X11 because it's intended to run on low-power, memory-constrained devices.
  MacOS doesn't use X11 because it's a consumer OS. Consumers typically don't set up networks of desktop machines in their homes and don't expect to be able to run native applications on remote machines while displaying and interacting with them on their local desktops.
  X11 is incredibly useful for engineers and technical people who use multiple Unix and Linux hosts to get their work done. Any other environment feels like working in a closet. X11 is complicated because the requirements are complicated. That's no reason to throw out 30 years of development and refinement.
  I guess the inevitable conclusion is that Ubuntu and Wayland developers don't care about engineers, professionals, and dedicated hackers. Good luck competing with Apple and Microsoft! In the meantime your core base will move on.
6. Re:I have long dreamt of the day by ChunderDownunder · 2012-07-10 14:18 · Score: 1
  
  There's a reason Android and MacOS do not use X Windows.
  Well in the case of Android, Wayland is coming!
  This implementation doesn't use share any Xorg legacy but rather cobbles together an implementation based on the graphics APIs exposed by the Android SDK.
  An eventual goal might be to replace the display technology - Google proprietary (aosp) SurfaceFlinger with a Wayland compositor. Thus with, say, CM13 your tablet would be able to run Android apps seamlessly alongside KDE Plasma apps. On the desktop, Android apps would thus interact with Unity on Ubuntu Wistful Wombat. ;-)
7. Re:I have long dreamt of the day by gnapster · 2012-07-10 18:54 · Score: 1
  
  Everyone who's ever attempted to do anything remotely GUI related knows it.
  On the other hand, anyone who's attempted to use any GUI, remotely, swears by it.
8. Re:I have long dreamt of the day by Wolfrider · 2012-07-11 03:42 · Score: 1
  
  Actually I swear by Nomachine NX - it has the best display speed EVAR for remote X connections.
  It has sadly fallen out of current development for Freebsd, however - or I would have it installed on my ZFS backup server. :(
  
  --
  .
  == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
would have got first post.... by sce7mjm · 2012-07-10 02:24 · Score: 5, Funny

but i'm still waiting for x to start...
1. Re:would have got first post.... by Osgeld · 2012-07-10 13:05 · Score: 1
  
  links2 -g works fine with slashdot and no X though you might want to load GPM beforehand cause tabbing though a page sucks
wayland is a bad choice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

Ubuntu is sparking a new 'unix war', dividing the linux ecosystem. It first pushed hard for its own Unity now with Wayland that breaks all current X apps. Theyr'e only in it for themselves.
Without X we will lose network transparency among many other great features. Let's not even mention the lack of gpu support to say the least.
1. Re:wayland is a bad choice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:32 · Score: 1
  
  I seriously doubt it will fracture linux any more than it already is. X will function as an add-on to wayland, so older apps and apps that need some specific X functionality will still be supported.
2. Re:wayland is a bad choice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:36 · Score: 1
  
  It isn't Linux most of us are worried about. The Linux people can do whatever they want to themselves. It's the consequences to the other UNIX like operating systems.
3. Re:wayland is a bad choice by vlm · 2012-07-10 02:37 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Without X we will lose network transparency among many other great features. Let's not even mention the lack of gpu support to say the least.
  VDPAU? They don't mention it, so I assume its going bye bye. Its kind of funny in that everything I use X for is everything Wayland opposes.
  Just this weekend I was ssh -X into my mythtv backend to run the config program to add another capture card running X over the network, so my binary only nvidia cards using VDPAU have more to look at. I never use stupid animations and other 3-d foolishness on my desktop because I'm unimpressed; its the 2010's version of the 1980's demand that all desktop publishing projects must use a minimum of 50 different ugly fonts to show off that you can do it. I prefer my content to be my primary interest, not my window animations. Of course all of that is impossible over wayland. Thanks guys for exactly what I don't need! Maybe you could make it eink and touch screen only, just to annoy me further?
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
4. Re:wayland is a bad choice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:57 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  X will function as an add-on to wayland,
  Yes, but this breaks the current seamless integration of remote and local apps that we have today. Presently, this works even for OpenGL based applications (although obviously slower over a network - but they run).
  Seamless remote/local app integration is a cornerstone of Unix-based systems going back to at least the 1980's. Breaking this is unacceptable.
5. Re:wayland is a bad choice by Dog-Cow · 2012-07-10 03:22 · Score: 1
  
  Unity is not gnome-shell.
  Wayland is not compatible with X.
  Any other crap you care to spew?
6. Re:wayland is a bad choice by lindi · 2012-07-10 03:26 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  We don't currently have seamless integration of remote and local apps. For example, there is no audio or freedesktop.org notifications for remote applications. I personally use xpra to get this seamless integration. Even though the name has "x" in it is not fundamentally tied to X protocols and will probably be easy to port to wayland. The data transmitted over network is compressed bitmap.
7. Re:wayland is a bad choice by unixisc · 2012-07-10 03:43 · Score: 1
  
  I dunno about GNOME3, but Wayland is certainly being embraced by Qt5 and is a target for KDE5, so it's not true that it's an Ubuntu only initiative. What I am curious about is whether there are any plans to get Wayland into the FreeBSD family of unixes - like FreeBSD, PC-BSD, DragonFly BSD, et al? Or into Minix?
8. Re:wayland is a bad choice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 03:44 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Troll much?
  How about people with local home networks of 2 or 3 machines? I use it all the damn time - like every single day. I run apps from a big powerful central server and display them over "ssh -X" to my low power laptop.
  I know you're just trolling, but people need to realize that people DO use "ssh -X" all the time. There are plenty of other repliers to this thread who have said they do as well.
9. Re:wayland is a bad choice by Gordonjcp · 2012-07-10 05:01 · Score: 1
  
  Does anyone in the real world actually care about network transparency?
10. Re:wayland is a bad choice by jedidiah · 2012-07-10 05:22 · Score: 1
  
  > It's a dead, dead, and dead feature
  I seriously have to wonder if any of you people have jobs or if you're just unemployed and live in your mother's basement. If you had been in a Windows or Unix shop in the last 10 years you would have seen examples of both X and RDP.
  If anything, the world is catching up to where Unix used to be. The demand for remote desktop functionality is actually INCREASING rather than decreasing.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
11. Re:wayland is a bad choice by serviscope_minor · 2012-07-10 05:22 · Score: 2
  
  Does anyone in the real world actually care about network transparency?
  You are part of the problem.
  The linux ecosystem used ot target niches well, and not unnecessarily restrict actions of people who have unusual needs.
  Now it's grown we get too many people who (like you) assume that if you don't personally do something, or if ti's only done by a relatively small fraction of the ecosystem, then it's unimportant.
  I use remote X often. I also use NFS home directories often, even though gnome and firefox seem determined to break that as much as possible.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
12. Re:wayland is a bad choice by allo · 2012-07-10 05:41 · Score: 2
  
  wayland can run on a xserver, and a xserver can be a wayland client. so you're wrong.
13. Re:wayland is a bad choice by thetoadwarrior · 2012-07-10 05:58 · Score: 1
  
  So Gnome was bad for being released after KDE? One of the great things about open source is that you can go off and do you own thing and someone doesn't like it they can go elsewhere.
  
  I don't know why some people are so afraid of choice and change.
14. Re:wayland is a bad choice by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-07-10 06:55 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I think GP's point is that RDP remoting architecture (which is perfectly doable on Weyland) is better than X11 model.
15. Re:wayland is a bad choice by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-07-10 06:56 · Score: 1
  
  Now it's grown we get too many people who (like you) assume that if you don't personally do something, or if ti's only done by a relatively small fraction of the ecosystem, then it's unimportant.
  Those who believe that it's important (for them) can go ahead and further maintain X11 and develop apps for it. That's what FOSS is all about, no?
16. Re:wayland is a bad choice by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 07:29 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, the data transmitted over the network varies based on how you tell XPRA to handle that. It can do X forwarding, VNC, and RDP.
17. Re:wayland is a bad choice by spitzak · 2012-07-10 07:38 · Score: 1
  
  I think you are confusing what will be done by the widget toolkits. They will draw the window borders (just like the draw the buttons and scrollbars and text fields and a hundred other things that are MUCH harder than window borders).
  Remoting will be done by a remoting wayland server. It will send the window images over the network to a remote display.
18. Re:wayland is a bad choice by makomk · 2012-07-10 08:53 · Score: 1
  
  Not just VDPAU. The entire closed source NVIDIA driver isn't usable with Wayland and probably never will be. Wayland requires developers to use the same KMS framework as the open source drivers (impossible for closed source drivers due to licensing issues), the same DRI2 buffer management and command submission code (effectively impossible because NVIDIA's driver codebase apparenly doesn't work in the way DRI2 assumes it does), and even that might not be enough.
19. Re:wayland is a bad choice by Gordonjcp · 2012-07-10 09:37 · Score: 1
  
  So, use X then. Most people (myself included) don't want to know how the stuff gets onto the screen, and don't see the attraction in being able to run xclock on a computer in Venezuela and have the display pop up on their local screen.
  I don't know if you remember what X was like before Xorg? Or indeed, even earlier than that, when (in the early 90s) you had to sit down with the workshop manual for your graphics card to work out exactly what to poke into the registers so you could get a display *at all*, never mind avoiding modes like 749x376 at 35Hz. All that is gone now, and good riddance!
20. Re:wayland is a bad choice by lennier · 2012-07-10 09:58 · Score: 1
  
  So Gnome was bad for being released after KDE?
  
  No, Gnome managed to be bad all on it's own.
  
  --
  You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
21. Re:wayland is a bad choice by M1FCJ · 2012-07-10 11:03 · Score: 1
  
  Go on... Tell me, how is it any better than seamless integration of a single app using a method which worked 25 years ago and still functions perfectly? Here, $dayjob is spent on doing SSH tunnels for X and then running some X11 apps. $hobbytime spent on doing more or less the same with the home server & the laptop. VNC or NX are workarounds for high latency low bandwidth networks.
22. Re:wayland is a bad choice by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-07-10 11:15 · Score: 2
  
  My understanding is that modern (i.e. Gtk & Qt) apps actually don't use the original method anymore - they effectively exchange composed bitmaps for entire top-level windows on the wire - and because X11 was not really meant to work that way, it ends up being slower than VNC, much less RDP. So it's more like taking a method which "still works" by not using 95% of the original method, and stripping that 95%.
23. Re:wayland is a bad choice by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-07-10 13:12 · Score: 1
  
  It's true that they exchange images on the wire, but they also utilize the XDamage extension to X, so they only have to transmit the parts of the bitmap that have changed, greatly reducing the amount of information necessary to draw the window.
  Well, that's kind of an obvious optimization in any such protocol - RDP does the same exact thing (no idea about VNC, I haven't used it much). That's still not incompatible with Weyland design, though.
24. Re:wayland is a bad choice by serviscope_minor · 2012-07-10 19:47 · Score: 1
  
  I don't know if you remember what X was like before Xorg?
  Yes, I do.
  you had to sit down with the workshop manual for your graphics card to work out exactly what to poke into the registers so you could get a display *at all*, never mind avoiding modes like 749x376 at 35Hz.
  You're confusing the XFree86 implementation with X11. On an SGI or whatever, you know where it was vendor supported, you plugged in everything and it just worked out of the box.
  All that is gone now, and good riddance!
  Exactly. So, whjat's that got to do with Wayland?
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
25. Re:wayland is a bad choice by serviscope_minor · 2012-07-10 19:52 · Score: 1
  
  That's what FOSS is all about, no?
  No.
  You seem to be confusing one of the main benefits of OSS (you can fork if you have to) wiht the idea that it's fine for people to needlessly mess things up. Su're they're free to, and I'm free to fork, but OSS isn't about people screwing up. That's patently ridiculous.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
26. Re:wayland is a bad choice by lindi · 2012-07-18 06:47 · Score: 1
  
  I think you are talking about winswitch now. I don't think xpra has VNC support.
Trust by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:24 · Score: 5, Funny

Who in their right mind would trust the Weyland-Yutani Corporation given what they did to the colonists on LV-426?
1. Re:Trust by lennier · 2012-07-10 10:02 · Score: 1
  
  Who in their right mind would trust the Weyland-Yutani Corporation given what they did to the colonists on LV-426?
  Exactly! The Hadley's Hope debacle demonstrates that you might not always need a fully network-transparent protocol with the ability to remote-administer a site from orbit - but when you need it, you really really need it.
  
  --
  You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Unsurprising by greg1104 · 2012-07-10 02:27 · Score: 4, Interesting

Is there anyone who still thinks the Ubuntu release team prioritizes either usability or low number of bugs now? That's a serious question; I have no idea why this is considered a novel or even notable thing at this point. New Ubuntu release, leading edge software that's not ready for prime time is included, the release is at best beta quality software by any reasonable standard. Same story in every release going back to at least the 8.04 PulseAudio debacle.
1. Re:Unsurprising by vlm · 2012-07-10 02:48 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe its trying to be modern art? Not supposed to be useful, or appealing, or beautiful, or traditional, or deeply thought provoking, just intended to momentarily inflame some passions or inspirations as people walk by on their way to doing real work on Mint and Debian and android and osx etc? A feeling, rather than a thought? Like gastrointestinal pain feeling vs the thought of refactoring a data parsing and importation routine? Of course those two are probably more closely related than you'd wish, but the point stands?
  There's nothing inherently wrong about any work of art. You can be wrong about trying to "use it" for certain tasks, or maybe wrong to use it at all to do anything. But as a piece of art it can be interesting to look at, as a ... escapist form of fine art, before returning to the real world to do real stuff with real tools.
  I don't particularly like Picasso's work. That it exists has no impact on the paper in my real world life, my junkmail, my reports, my old fashioned printed books...
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
2. Re:Unsurprising by DoofusOfDeath · 2012-07-10 02:51 · Score: 1
  
  Well there is this constant tension when developing software in a competitive market. You want to release stuff that's as refined as possible, but you might lose users when competitors' products evolve faster than yours. So it's a constant attempt to balance innovation and refinement.
  That being said, I do think Ubuntu has gotten the balance wrong over the past few years. At least speaking for myself, the lack of polish (especially desktop environments and graphics drivers) has cause me more distress than the distress I would have felt from slightly more stale packages.
3. Re:Unsurprising by CapineiroCapaz · 2012-07-10 02:52 · Score: 1
  
  Who is forcing you to upgrade from 12.04 LTS? It will receive security fixes for years.
4. Re:Unsurprising by JonySuede · 2012-07-10 06:29 · Score: 1
  
  I don't particularly like Picasso's work. That it exists has no impact on the paper in my real world life, my junkmail, my reports, my old fashioned printed books...
  Cubist spam is a life changing event, I pity you as you missed one of the best things that life has to offer!
  
  --
  Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
5. Re:Unsurprising by Zaiff+Urgulbunger · 2012-07-10 06:55 · Score: 1
  
  Who is forcing you to upgrade from 12.04 LTS? It will receive security fixes for years.
  I'm stranded on 10.10 whilst I try to get 12.04 working... but I'm still getting random crashes with Unity 3D vs. nVidia. No idea if Canonical ever intend to upgrade "nvidia-current" (295.40)... so I've manually removed it and installed "nvidia-current-updates" (295.49), but I've still had a crash* so it seems the next best option available to me is the X-Updates PPA. So much for 12.04 being an LTS release though. :/
  
  * by crash, I mean I get kicked out to the login screen.
Developers won't meet fictional deadline? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:28 · Score: 5, Informative

I read the article and the Ubuntu Wayland wiki. The Ubuntu developers have not set any deadline, they don't appear to have set a specific goal, they're just continuing their work on Wayland as usual. The article appears to have just pulled the release target out of the author's arse and then claimed the developers won't make it in time. From the linked page:
"When will Wayland become the default on Ubuntu?
This has not been decided. This decision will be made at a future Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS)."
So apparently the developers won't reach their goal that they haven't set. How is this a story?
1. Re:Developers won't meet fictional deadline? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 04:10 · Score: 1
  
  Quantal Quetzal is quantal. That's why.
2. Re:Developers won't meet fictional deadline? by daver00 · 2012-07-10 23:02 · Score: 1
  
  I dunno, it sparked a pretty interesting flame war here on slashdot?
Huh? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · 2012-07-10 02:31 · Score: 2

> Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland In Quantal Quetzal
Blort?

--
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Quantal Quetzal Quisach Haderach by Picass0 · 2012-07-10 02:32 · Score: 1

You know what I hate about Ubuntu? Sandworms.
1. Re:Quantal Quetzal Quisach Haderach by Thud457 · 2012-07-10 03:25 · Score: 1
  
  You know what I hate about Ubuntu? Sandworms.
  Beetlejuice BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJ mmph!
  
  really /.? that's some inept markup handling there...
  
  --
  the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
2. Re:Quantal Quetzal Quisach Haderach by Picass0 · 2012-07-10 07:26 · Score: 1
  
  I googled it. Blame google.
Bling by spivster · 2012-07-10 02:34 · Score: 1

I've tried several releases of Ubuntu over the years, only to give up in frustration at all the configuration needed just to (for example) get wireless to work. Finally, with Precise, Ubuntu "just works" (pretty much) right out of the box. Per TFA, Quantal will rely on fallbacks because AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA binary Linux graphics drivers won't work with Wayland. Huh? Why shoot themselves in the foot when they've finally gotten things right, just for something that's primarily cosmetic?
1. Re:Bling by CanHasDIY · 2012-07-10 02:40 · Score: 2
  
  I've tried several releases of Ubuntu over the years, only to give up in frustration at all the configuration needed just to (for example) get wireless to work. Finally, with Precise, Ubuntu "just works" (pretty much) right out of the box.
  Yea, unless you have a Broadcom wireless card, like I do...
  
  Know what really sucks about that? The wireless was working fine prior to the Precise upgrade.
  
  Looks like one step forward, two steps back to me.
  
  --
  An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
End of network display? by Compaqt · 2012-07-10 02:34 · Score: 4, Interesting

That would be sad.
But beyond that: there's one big deficiency of current X applications--if the X server dies, so do all graphical programs.
That's quite surprising when you think about it.
After all the graphical programs are X clients. Why would a client up and die just because some server died?
Does your browser die when a webserver dies?
And please, no pretending that X on Linux doesn't crash. It does, and this is the 4th time I've restarted this laptop today. Hanging hard with VirtualBox.
To sum: If the graphics server crashes, I'd like to see it automatically restart with Upstart, and then the clients automatically reconnect.

--
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
1. Re:End of network display? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:40 · Score: 1
  
  Because then anyone with the access and know-how to crash your X server could effectively hijack your session. It is safer and more secure for X clients to assume that a new session is... well... a new session.
2. Re:End of network display? by csubi · 2012-07-10 02:48 · Score: 1
  
  X seemed pretty stable for me over the last 5?6?7 years, it was not the bottleneck / lowest common denominator for the usability of the distros I used over the years.
  Does your browser die when a webserver dies?
  Just don't start your webserver from a terminal you opened while logged in to X.
  You know, CTRL+SHFT+_1-6_, log in and start your webserver. Or have it started at boot time. Or put it into background.
3. Re:End of network display? by vlm · 2012-07-10 02:59 · Score: 1
  
  To sum: If the graphics server crashes, I'd like to see it automatically restart with Upstart, and then the clients automatically reconnect.
  I encourage my competitors to implement this, etc etc. You know what would be hilarious? Your buggy hardware (I haven't had a X crash in, I don't even know, certainly more than a decade) combined with root logged in and doing some admin GUI thing. X crashes. Logs itself back in. Before the user gets to interact, the GUI admin thing crashes X again. Repeat infinitely. Oh no problemo just log in as root to break that loop... errr... thats not gonna work because its root who's stuck in the loop. Wipe the hard drive and reinstall?
  In ye dark ages of firefox I have run into this, where bringing up some cruddy coded web page full of cruft crashed FF (which admittedly should have failed gracefully, but still, cruft is cruft) and then on restart FF asks if I wanna restore my session. Oh heck no, that's just gonna crash FF again!
  On the other hand, given basically bug free client and server software, you've just described the behavior of NFS, AFS, probably a couple other networked filesystems. I've never had to reboot a client because of a server problem in NFS or AFS. The server comes back online and all is well as if nothing happened.
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
4. Re:End of network display? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 03:09 · Score: 1
  
  The Wayland folks say, "You can still run an X server app in Wayland".
  Of course, this completely misses the point that this DOES break network transparency of apps.
5. Re:End of network display? by TheSpoom · 2012-07-10 03:27 · Score: 1
  
  And please, no pretending that X on Linux doesn't crash. It does, and this is the 4th time I've restarted this laptop today. Hanging hard with VirtualBox.
  Not arguing that at all, but I do have a bit of an issue with the inference that it crashes frequently. I haven't seen X crash on my laptop in several months. VirtualBox provides a rather unique environment.
  I'd definitely like to see windows reconnect to X automatically though instead of just dying.
  
  --
  It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
  - E. Debs
6. Re:End of network display? by Dog-Cow · 2012-07-10 03:33 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Today, no non-X app is network transparent. Tomorrow, no non-X app will be network transparent.
  If nothing is changing, how can something break?
  Idiot.
7. Re:End of network display? by danomac · 2012-07-10 03:47 · Score: 1
  
  I haven't had X crash in more than two years now. I blame nVidia for the crashes I had before that, though.
8. Re:End of network display? by theCoder · 2012-07-10 04:02 · Score: 1
  
  Running an X server only fixes part of the problem. Sure, today, most applications are X clients, and thus running an X server on Wayland will allow for network transparency. But what happens in a few years when many applications start becoming only Wayland clients? I won't be able to ssh somewhere and run the Wayland applications, no matter what server (Wayland and/or X) I'm running locally. And even if someone comes up with a way of forwarding Wayland traffic, what happens when I'm sitting at a machine that only has X installed?
  
  --
  "Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
9. Re:End of network display? by firewrought · 2012-07-10 04:09 · Score: 2
  
  Today, no non-X app is network transparent. Tomorrow, no non-X app will be network transparent.
  If nothing is changing, how can something break?
  Idiot.
  You know what he means. Tomorrow (if Wayland becomes ascendent), the previously X-based API's you use for drawing a GUI will migrate to Wayland and your app will have to either give up network transparency or forgo the latest version (which might be fine at first, but will eventually force you to confront some form of version/dependency/compiler/forking hell). What's "breaking" is the ease of future development...
  Of course, I think defenders of X are pretty slow to acknowledge the problems with how X handles network transparency. It's useful to an extent, but the way Microsoft did it with RDP is way more user-friendly.
  
  --
  -1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
10. Re:End of network display? by devent · 2012-07-10 04:12 · Score: 1
  
  It's always nice to say "xxxx don't work, don't pretend it works, because it crashes yyy times/day for me". For everyone that starts a discussion like this, there are 100 others for which the xxxx just works and they do their work and are quite.
  It would be nice if you share your hardware configuration, or if you open a bug report. Because for me X just works, and it just works for at least 2 years (since I started using Linux) with very different laptops and PCs. I can't recall anytime where X crashed.
  There were some issues with Wine after a game; there were some issues with suspend or hibernate. But that is certainly not X11 fault. I never saw that X11 just crashed in a normal usage.
  
  --
  http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
11. Re:End of network display? by Hatta · 2012-07-10 05:00 · Score: 1
  
  And please, no pretending that X on Linux doesn't crash. It does, and this is the 4th time I've restarted this laptop today. Hanging hard with VirtualBox.
  That's not X hanging, that's VirtualBox hanging.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
12. Re:End of network display? by Hatta · 2012-07-10 05:04 · Score: 2
  
  How does such a deliberately obtuse post get modded insightful?
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
13. Re:End of network display? by jedidiah · 2012-07-10 05:28 · Score: 1
  
  And please, no pretending that X on Linux doesn't crash. It does, and this is the 4th time I've restarted this laptop today. Hanging hard with VirtualBox.
  
  You're talking about an app that comes with it's own kernel modules. It's own kernel modules are probably what's causing the problem.
  Although I've run vobx for months and months at a time myself with no trouble.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
14. Re:End of network display? by jedidiah · 2012-07-10 05:30 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Nope. You're the idiot.
  Today all of our apps are network transparent.
  Tomorrow they will all be recompiled for Wayland and not be network transparent anymore.
  You idiots trying to re-invent the Mac should actually use one sometime.
  
  --
  A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
15. Re:End of network display? by AvitarX · 2012-07-10 08:15 · Score: 1
  
  I hope this forces the more popular toolkits to add network transparency.
  The pieces are there I suspect, I've seen some pretty impressive things done with GTK back-ends (one that makes it a character interface for consoles (a side project never part of the main), and another that makes it a browser app and network transparent (more like a single Window VNC).
  There's also a QT one (I think) that uses a console frame-buffer rather than X.
  The toolkit should be in a better place to do the transparency efficiently too.
  
  --
  Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
16. Re:End of network display? by lennier · 2012-07-10 10:10 · Score: 1
  
  After all the graphical programs are X clients. Why would a client up and die just because some server died?
  This! I've wondered exactly this since about 1997, when I first got into Linux. Decoupling the X Server and clients from running in the same session... since it's network transparent and all and was designed for the server being even on a completely different machine... seemed like the obvious thing to do and it boggled me that none of the mainstream desktop environments ever did it.
  I even managed to install a whole second X instance on Ubuntu once, just so that I could run Wine and Dosbox games which occasionally crashed and left the GUI in an unstable state, and then I could restart the X server without losing my main workspace. But it seemed like a ridiculous workaround for something which has inexplicably never been implemented despite being "one of the main advantages of X".
  
  --
  You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
17. Re:End of network display? by Yenya · 2012-07-10 19:15 · Score: 2
  
  Today all of our apps are network transparent.
  Sadly, this is not true anymore. Many apps today depend on things like D-Bus or PulseAudio, which cannot be easily forwarded through the X protocol connection. Add a "run only a single instance of $app no matter what" mentality to the mix, and you are screwed: the $app started on a remote machine detects that another instance (on a completely different machine but the same display) is running, and tries to forward its own command line arguments to the previously running instance. But arguments like filenames are depended on the X client machine. Oops.
  
  --
  -Yenya
  --
  While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
18. Re:End of network display? by diego.viola · 2012-07-11 02:13 · Score: 1
  
  Nobody is preventing us to implement network transparency in a compositor or whatever.
simple question about Wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:38 · Score: 1

Can someone answer this simple question about Wayland?
If I'm on such a Wayland-based system and I have a bash session in a terminal window. Does this continue to work?
[bash prompt]: ssh -X remotehost SomeProgram
Will SomeProgram's GUI be displayed on my local Wayland display, just as with X today, even if SomeProgram uses 3D via OpenGL, just as works today in X.org? And will this work without having to embed everything in some X-server-window type thing like the kludge that Windows uses to display X programs? That is, will SomeProgram appear natively on my desktop just as today?
If not, then this is breaking a fundamental aspect of the Unix architecture going back decades, and should in no way be the default for any mainstream operating system.
If it does work, hey, great.
1. Re:simple question about Wayland by Bitsy+Boffin · 2012-07-10 03:17 · Score: 1
  
  It does not work. Last I heard the answer was "use VNC" or some such nonsense.
  Replacing X is one thing, replacing it with an inferior product however is ludicrous. Ludicrous is unfortunately something that Ubuntu is quite adept at :-(
  
  --
  NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
2. Re:simple question about Wayland by TheRaven64 · 2012-07-10 03:47 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  It will work if SomeProgram is an X program, just as it does on OS X or Windows if you have an X server installed. It won't work if SomeProgram is a Wayland program. Wayland eliminates a number of process boundaries in X, moving the window and compositing managers into the main executable. This is done for performance reasons, presumably by people who have never profiled an X server and therefore not noticed that these round trips are not a bottleneck in modern systems, and at the expense of stability (if your compositing manager crashes in Wayland, your display server also dies, with X11 it can be restarted, usually without any data loss).
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
3. Re:simple question about Wayland by Hatta · 2012-07-10 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  It won't work if SomeProgram is a Wayland program.
  That's the problem. If Wayland becomes the default, we can't count on being able to forward arbitrary apps over the network. That's far too big a price to pay for anything Wayland could possibly offer.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
4. Re:simple question about Wayland by serviscope_minor · 2012-07-10 05:36 · Score: 1
  
  This is done for performance reasons, presumably by people who have never profiled an X server and therefore not noticed that these round trips are not a bottleneck in modern systems
  This. 1000 times this!
  Ping times via the TCP/IP stack are 70micro seconds on an old, slow machine. Via unix domain sockets, they are very much less.
  The entire exercise of wayland is what happens when you mix bored developers + ooo shiny + premature optimization.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
5. Re:simple question about Wayland by spitzak · 2012-07-10 07:57 · Score: 1
  
  You are going to get flooded with idiots who will say "no". That is wrong.
  When you run the program, the environment will be different and this will change the code in the library that talks to wayland so that it sends the window images (compressed) over the network to a client on your local machine, which will then tell the local wayland server to display them.
  This is EXACTLY how X works. When you run "ssh -X" the ONLY thing it does is set $DISPLAY to a different value. The xlib library knows how to interpret this environment variable and send all the communication back to the x server on your local machine. About the only difference is that instead of a thread in the x server, it is likely a different process for the wayland server. You should realize there is no magic, there is a huge block of code in that xlib library RUNNING ON YOUR REMOTE MACHINE. Same with wayland.
  In addition wayland should be much much much faster for any modern program (such as your OpenGL example) that wants to render an image and then display it. Any program using antialiased fonts is pretty much going to require less communication to send an image of the window over the network than to send the data it needs to get a remote drawing. People really use VNC and virtual gl because it is faster than remote X.
Wayland will NOT be replacing X11 in 12.10 by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 02:41 · Score: 5, Informative

Canonical has plans to include Wayland as a technical preview in 12.10, not as a replacement for X11. This means that they have to actually get it working at a basic level before putting it in the repositories. While Canonical is pushing Wayland, they've already said that it's still several years away from becoming a viable replacement for X11. This is just Canonical trying to push forward the development of a peice of software they believe in.
1. Re:Wayland will NOT be replacing X11 in 12.10 by msobkow · 2012-07-10 05:05 · Score: 1
  
  Personally I still don't understand what need there is to replace X. Instead of replacing X entirely, how about just fixing the few remaining bugs that are affecting people and causing server crashes? It would seem to be a lot less work to do so than to start from scratch with a new bug^H^H^H^code base.
  is X old? Sure. But it was well designed for what it was intended to do, and as I'm not one of those people affected by server crashes, I'm perfectly happy with it.
  
  --
  I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Wayland doesn't break X by k(wi)r(kipedia) · 2012-07-10 03:15 · Score: 1

Ubuntu is sparking a new 'unix war', dividing the linux ecosystem. It first pushed hard for its own Unity now with Wayland that breaks all current X apps. Theyr'e only in it for themselves.
Wayland doesn't break X, if by "break" you mean stop something from working. You can run Wayland concurrently with X. All those X-incompatible will simply run under X.
1. Re:Wayland doesn't break X by 0123456 · 2012-07-10 05:17 · Score: 2
  
  Wayland doesn't break X, if by "break" you mean stop something from working. You can run Wayland concurrently with X. All those X-incompatible will simply run under X.
  But you can't run that Wayland app remotely with the display on another machine. Unless you use a disgusting kludge like VNC.
2. Re:Wayland doesn't break X by k(wi)r(kipedia) · 2012-07-10 10:56 · Score: 1
  
  Okay, it's kind of like the difference between vi and emacs. Wayland is kind of like vi and emacs is like the X system. To a vi user, emacs appears to be doing too much. Which is what X is to the typical desktop user. In fact, the ability not to run a Wayland app remotely directly seems like a security feature, one less (admittedly small) path for an attacker to gain control of your system.
3. Re:Wayland doesn't break X by ChunderDownunder · 2012-07-10 14:08 · Score: 2
  
  Is there such a thing as a "Wayland app"? My understanding is that the ability to run GUI applications depends on the various toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt being ported to be Wayland native. Such applications thus don't have any direct dependency on X11 nor Wayland.
  Rather, the application would load a shared library which selects a display backend seamlessly at runtime. The choice to utilize Wayland, local X or remote could be handled more or less transparently, e.g. as the DISPLAY variable currently does.
  X11 support isn't going to disappear overnight from the common toolkits any more than Qt and GTK+ will cease to exist on non Unix platforms. e.g. Gimp and Pidgin run fine on Windows, Qt runs on the Playbook.
4. Re:Wayland doesn't break X by ChunderDownunder · 2012-07-10 14:27 · Score: 1
  
  You're invoking -X, which implies an X session. I wouldn't expect it to 'display natively' as Wayland.
  However, they do talk about embedding X servers on top of wayland, so wrapping a remote application by spawning a X session on your local Wayland desktop seems feasible.
  If the vision is true, such teething problems in backwards compatibility should disappear. Remoting 'Wayland-specific applications' without an X11 fallback is a different matter.
Why Wayland? by JDG1980 · 2012-07-10 03:18 · Score: 1

I understand that X11 is obsolete crap and has to go, but why are they using Wayland instead of, say, DirectFB? From what I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong, Linux really isn't my thing) DirectFB is much better supported and a more mature product.
1. Re:Why Wayland? by snadrus · 2012-07-10 03:54 · Score: 1
  
  DirectFB has severe limitations that can't be "fixed", and even X11 provides more than it offers: Input handling, multi-monitor, hardware acceleration. Wayland allows zero-copy handoffs of a buffer to the server (through video card memory) which can then use harware acceleration to compose into a final multi-window image. Many toolkits already render buffers on the video card, so keeping the data there results in fewer copies. Even cell-phones have hardware acceleration now, so keeping images in video ram is just logical.
  
  --
  Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
2. Re:Why Wayland? by serviscope_minor · 2012-07-10 05:33 · Score: 2
  
  I understand that X11 is obsolete crap and has to go,
  Well, you understand wrong, unless you also consider Windows 7 and Lion as obsolete crap which has to go.
  Most new code doesn't use the ancient parts of the X protocol, much like most new code on Windows doesn't use the ancient windows APIs or most new code on OSX[*] doesn't use ancient APIs.
  Just because the old stuff is in for backwards compatibility doesn't mean you have to use it, or that the new stuff is somehow old. I'd bet you could make most of the old protocol graphics calls return errors and a modern desktop would still work.
  Anyone who claims that the old code paths are bloaty is essentially a liar or a fool. They were written in 1987. Basically anything written in 1987 is by modern standards a minute piece of software.
  The mix of modern and old APIs going under the name X11R7.??? actually form a pretty good system. Sure there are warts (as there inevitably will be in Wayland as soon as its ont brand new), but Wayland isn't the answer to the warts. It's basically a new system written by people bored of hacking X11 who would rather make something shiny even it discards really useful features,
  Actually, if you look at the FUD written by some of the Wayland developers, it is shameful, and done by people who really ought to know better.
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
3. Re:Why Wayland? by RogerWilco · 2012-07-10 20:36 · Score: 1
  
  What I've learned about software developers, is that they much rather develop something new from scratch, often reinventing the wheel, than change an maintain an older stable piece of software.
  What is also known from Software Engineering, is that developing something new is relatively easy, maintaining it, is where it gets hard usually.
  Linux is just a software developers dream.
  
  --
  RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
4. Re:Why Wayland? by diego.viola · 2012-07-11 02:17 · Score: 1
  
  Please quit FUDing.
nVidia/AMD will NOT support wayland by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-10 03:36 · Score: 1

Please note: neither nVidia nor AMD has any plans to support their high performance drivers natively under Wayland.
That means you will be limited to low performance Intel graphics, or low performance open source drivers that don't provide many modern OpenGL features.
Wayland is a non-starter if it doesn't have either of the two heavy-hitter graphics makers on board.
Sometimes... by drjones78 · 2012-07-10 03:40 · Score: 1

... I woefully wonder if I'm the only one who has the fastidious feeling that the noritious names for Ubuntu releases are idiosyncratically idiotic and horrendously horrible
1. Re:Sometimes... by FranTaylor · 2012-07-10 05:20 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe you'd be better off if you worried about being such a worthless pedant
2. Re:Sometimes... by drjones78 · 2012-07-10 06:04 · Score: 1
  
  Such a disconsolate digression! This accused pedant pontificator is really just a jocund jester. Sheesh!
3. Re:Sometimes... by lennier · 2012-07-10 10:19 · Score: 1
  
  Unpossible! Ubuntu's clever cryptonyms grant graciously memorable mnemonic nomenclature, nicely.
  
  --
  You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Still works by snadrus · 2012-07-10 03:44 · Score: 1

Support arrows go the other way. Wayland uses X11's direct rendering which is works great for ATI in 2.6.38 & for Nouveau (open-source NVidia driver). NVidia's the "worst-supported", but it still runs, just at slightly slower than it should.

--
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
1. Re:Still works by diego.viola · 2012-07-11 02:16 · Score: 1
  
  Wrong. All bugs I've reported to Nouveau developers, they all got fixed, so please quit with your FUD.
yeah right by FranTaylor · 2012-07-10 04:50 · Score: 1

Steve Ballmer once called Linux a cancer and now Microsoft writes kernel drivers
How is life in your reality where time stands still and nothing ever changes?
Ubuntu Still A Steaming Pile by ilikenwf · 2012-07-10 06:07 · Score: 1

Not trolling, but I think that it's interesting that Ubuntu has the same kind of fanboy nature these days that Apple does. In reality, while it does fill the two niches of "I need a linux box setup ASAP," and "I'm a n00b and what is Linux?," Ubuntu as it is sucks.

If you want something that's lightweight, not running 50 daemons from a fresh install, and something that's actually custom as you want it all the way down to the source, is Archlinux, Gentoo, or Slackware not a better option?

Then, even Debian is better than Ubuntu - and it covers both markets of new users and people who just need to get a box up and running quickly.

Ubuntu is really just linux for n00bs and lazy people.
Gotta say... by datsa · 2012-07-10 06:20 · Score: 1

I love the name.
Desktop Linux by ceswiedler · 2012-07-10 09:16 · Score: 1

This is what Desktop Linux is. It's companies trying to make a version of Linux which Just Works for people who don't care that it's Linux. That means sacrificing choice in the name of making the product more tailored for the users they're targeting. That's good design.
Your fundamental complaint is that Ubuntu isn't tailoring its product for you. It's a completely free and open product, planned from the start to make Linux more usable by non-technical people. And you're complaining. Despite the fact that there are literally dozens of other Linux distributions which do exactly what you want. Nice.
1. Re:Desktop Linux by lennier · 2012-07-10 10:25 · Score: 1
  
  It's a completely free and open product, planned from the start to make Linux more usable by non-technical people. And you're complaining.
  Yes, because it doesn't actually work even for that purpose.
  It's a noble goal to make computers useful for newbies. Really it is. But doing it wrong doesn't help anybody, and just because you're doing it for free (um, despite the massive amounts of cash flowing into Canonical which must be coming from somewhere) doesn't mean you get to censor valid criticism of what you're doing wrong.
  
  --
  You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Just to clear things up by Trogre · 2012-07-10 10:15 · Score: 1

Firstly, Ubuntu aren't forcing Wayland on anyone as it is not the default - it's just there if you want it.
Secondly, Wayland could well become a decent display manager, just as soon as they incorporate network transparency. And not a minute before.

--
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Re:Desktop Linux is Dead by diego.viola · 2012-07-11 02:20 · Score: 1

Bullshit.

Your brain is what is dead. Moron.