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Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland in Quantal Quetzal
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."
>> 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.
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?
but i'm still waiting for x to start...
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.
Who in their right mind would trust the Weyland-Yutani Corporation given what they did to the colonists on LV-426?
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.
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?
> Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland In Quantal Quetzal
Blort?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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
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
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.
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).
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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.
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.
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.