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Ubuntu Delays Wayland Plans, System Compositor
An anonymous reader writes "The Wayland-usage in Ubuntu 12.10 via setting it up as a system video compositor has been delayed to at least Ubuntu 13.04. Developers made progress on running Ubuntu on Wayland (there are experimental packages available), but they need more time to complete their work and ready Wayland. For those wanting to try out Wayland on Linux, there is a specialty Wayland LiveCD."
Shit sux. X11 for life! Stop crapifying Linux with stupid eye candy trying to chase MacOS SUX and Windoze.
Yes, I know I can Google, but a one sentence description would've made the summary far more useful.
Every time I see a screenshot of Wayland, I see rotated windows. Is that its only feature?
The usual Ubuntu practice is to jam incomplete, beta quality changes (grub2, upstart, plymouth, unity, etc.) into release and fix them them in subsequent
releases. This decision is a welcome change.
Or maybe Wayland is so un-ready that even the usual Ubuntu powers-that-be couldn't allow it to be foisted on users, in which case we'll see beta quality Wayland in 13.04.
I'm betting on #2.
Not that I'm complaining, but there is wisdom in adopting realistic expectations.
I am so sad about this. I wanted my crappy Unity look to be better! lol
Things will get better once the Yutani Corporation enters the picture.
Dear timothy,
Thank you for the update. You may continue about your business.
Yours faithfully,
System Compositor.
It's not really a case of Wayland itself not being ready, more like the graphical driver ecosystem is way too fragmented and spotty for Wayland to be implemented on all(maybe most) systems. And I believe Qt and GTK are not fully ported to Wayland, let alone all the other applications and libraries that interface directly with X.
Unfortunately the GNU ecosystem is too dependent on X, thus Wayland seems impossible to implement at this time, but a fresh clean window manager is a big step in the right direction.
And no Wayland is not a GUI.
They should call it by another name. I'll see if I can think up one.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I use Ubuntu server at work, does that count?
It seems pointless to me when there's Debian (which I use in all my systems), unless you want to keep the system without upgrading to a new version for more than three years, which we don't.
That said, it's not that annoying either. And I actually like Upstart, for now, at least.
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I use Ubuntu Server LTS on personal and business servers. It's Debian regression tested and provides a nice support guarantee. My only complaint is Plymouth hiding boot messages. Everything else is fine.
I have made multiple attempts to use Ubuntu on desktop machines. The issues are legion and each time I gave up after fighting hard to beat the mess into submission. So it's Mint and OpenSUSE (employer preference) on desktops. Both work well with reasonable levels of effort.
I find ubuntu to be great. My computer illiterate wife can use it. Hell, shes even starting to use the CLIMy 3 year old daughter can use it, and with a little fine tuning and patience I even found it acceptable.
It wouldn't surprise me if the tool that is behind the abortion known as systemctl is also a part of this monstrosity.
It's sad to see Linux distros going this "me too" route of solutions in search of a problem. If this POS picks up momentum, makes it into Fedora (like systemctl), then filters down to RedHat, it's off to BSD-land... (Thank FSM for BSD)
>> I thought this was a hardcore tech site
/., being a shadow of its' former self, exists pretty much to inject politics and religion into nearly EVERY story/summary in order to troll the readership, thus driving revenue via ad impressions. /tinfoil
Oh no, you're right: it actually was at one time. Now
>>If I wanted my mom or dad to use Linux, I'd give them Ubuntu...
You'd do that to your mom and dad? I'd at least have the decency to set them up with, say, Mint...
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Tip the veal & try the waitresses!
Not at work, but I've been using it at home for years. I stopped upgrading when they left me with a choice between Gnome 3 and Unity, and I'll have to switch to Mint soon.
I thought this was a hardcore tech site, but Ubuntu is a pile of crap, and anyone who has tried other distros (crap like CentOS doesn't count) usually likes the other distros better. Debian, Archlinux, Gentoo - these are distros that don't suck, don't go into dependency hell every upgrade, and don't make a gui for everything, with ads and daemons and useless crapp tossed in.
I don't see choosing some particular distro that important. They all carry mostly the same software and have somewhat similar mechanisms for package management and maintaining the system.
Ubuntu helped me completely switch over to linux back in 2004-2005. But once they changed to Unity, I moved to Linux Mint Debian and haven't looked back.
Sad, really. Their forums were one of the best things about them. As I learned tips and tricks, it became sort of a hobby to visit the forums and try to answer questions for even bigger noobs than me. Not much I can do there now. And the Debian boards are more of a listen and learn place for me. I miss the community, but the OS has made itself unusable. Wayland sounds like a way of piling that mistake higher and deeper.
Wayland has little to do with GUIs; it's the software layer underneath the graphics.
Unless I can do "ffmpeg -waylandgrab ..." I don't want it.
Wayland is stillborn thanks to the open source release of CDE!
Now GNOME and KDE will die their much deserved agonizing deaths!
Haha, seriously though, they've got wayland to fuck with. I wish they'd leave fucking X alone and at least have kept the goddamn DRI1/XAA support for older hardware that hadn't gotten updated. Besides which the latest X releases I'd imagine don't work on pre-3.x kernels, which means some people whose hardware is unsupported can no longer update to the latest version for patches/security fixes. Nevermind the bloat. Have you guys looked at the archive sizes for the 3.3.x X released, then compared them to the 4.x and now Freedesktop releases? They've like 20-40x larger! And if you go and look at the supported video platforms you might ask yourself *WHY*.
Wayland will just be more of the same.
As far as I'm concerned, Wayland is a non-starter as long as it continues to be ambiguous about whether or not it will support network transparency. I really don't want there to be a situation where someone writes a graphical server control application that needs to run on the server but won't display on some other computer. With X11 this is effortless. With Wayland, it's a mushy wishwash of "no, it's not supported, you don't need it, so shut up" mixed with "maybe it'll support it, but that's not our focus".
I stopped upgrading when they left me with a choice between Gnome 3 and Unity
and KDE4 and XFCE and TWM and RatPoison and MonadWM and FVWM2 and Enlightenment and ....
Any or all of those are an apt-get install away and will integrate with GDM to give you the choice at login.
Curse such lack of choice!
No doubt this is a stupid question (I'm not really that familiar with the technical details of the Linux graphics stack), but why is middleware like X11 or Wayland needed at all? Why can't the desktop/window manager talk directly to OpenGL, which in turn talks to the graphics hardware via a driver? Intuitively, it would seem like this would give better performance and fewer places for bugs to crop up. Why do there have to be 20 different layers in the rendering stack? Is this just abstraction for abstraction's sake or is there actually a good reason?
It's becoming more and more obvious that Shuttleworth and his crew couldn't organise sex in a brothel. I'm so glad I ditched them and returned to Debian.
What does Wayland propose to give us that isn't already available with a stack like E17 (with Evas alone doing a lot of what the entire benefit of Wayland is supposed to be) on top of X11?
I've looked at their list of features. Is there something else that provides some advantage that hasn't been listed? I just cannot see any advantage other than "let's have our own X, but without the hookers and blackjack".
I guess that the same people who don't want networking in X are the same people who uses VNC on Linux because they don't know better...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It would be hilarious to me, if it weren't already infuriating, that so many people decry how crappy Ubuntu is, and go on to complain about the user interace. If you're a hardcore user, it shouldn't matter what distribution you're running, you can change whatever you want about it, that's what's great about Linux. But some people need to show how big their Linux Organ is by dumping on a somewhat popular form of Linux. Don't like Unity? There are TONS of other DM out there, try one. If you still hate Xubuntu or Lubuntu, go with any other distro you want, but be aware that you're just choosing a different package manager (if even that). If you think that no distro has it right, then get going with Arch and spin your own web of desktop doom for others to rag on. Basically, what I'm trying to say is shit or get off the pot.
My biggest beef with the Ubuntu project is its reaction to user complaints about poorly configured, buggy subsystems.
Rather than have someone on the team learn, say, alsa or grub and configure it properly, they rush to adopt flaky beta versions of replacements like pulseaudio and grub2. As they still don't have anyone who understands the replacements they too are shipped in a poorly configured manner, introducing a whole new set of frustrations.
Will replacing X with Wayland fare any better? Not unless Ubuntu configure it properly.
its a droid
Yes, but my question was "what does it give us".
If it's a simple monolithic thing does that lock it down or are there plans to make it extensible in the future like X is? Does it all have to go into memory at once or only just the bits you use, like the X extensions, Evas etc do now (without having to muck around directly with the X libraries anyway)?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I see it as a cathedral vs bazaar thing where it's hard to add more to the monolithic thing but easy to add a bit more to the modular thing. If X was monolithic to the level of the window manager we'd all be stuck on mwm or similar instead of the many side projects that made it as useful as it is today.
Anyway, I'd say go for it on it's own merits but it looks a bit early to be talking about a full X replacement unless it brings something else in that can't be done with X.
For Weyland to work applications will need to support it and nVidia & AMD will need to support it. It needs to be available via a fairly simple install before I'll try to port my applications to it. I'm hoping the Weyland developers are actually talking to nVidia and AMD and Cannonical doesn't release this until they have at least beta drivers.
I'm not too worried about the network transparency even though I use it everyday. Most of the applications I use remotely are things like emacs that are a bit slower when sending images rather than text to be rendered but don't really need the performance X11 can give you with remote applications. Remote OpenGL is nice and I remember being annoyed when only SGI supported it, but no one explicitly writes to that because it has never been universally supported.
I'm not totally up on how Weyland will work but as I understand it the main push is to provide a simpler API that gets rid of stuff like having the X server render your fonts. Instead your application will do that using a toolkit like Qt and hand the image over to the Weyland server. I don't care if indexed color or binary bitmap support goes away, but if RGB/RGBA is the only bitmap supported that would be a problem. How things will things like XVideo and VDPAU will work? We can do YUV->RGB conversion in the application but it means pushing a lot more data across the bus and generally you don't even want video composited. Anyway being able to run Weyland easily will let me know what is already there and what I will need to convince the Weyland developers to add before it goes mainstream.
"Wayland is a new protocol that enables 3D compositors to be used as primary display servers, instead of running the 3D compositor as an extension under the (2D) X.org display server." link
AccountKiller
x.org folks will kill X by trying to compete with Wayland. I think the GNU zealots should move on to Wayland and leave the rest of us alone. Linux can have it's own graphics system at this point. I was worried about stagnation for every other UNIX like OS, but at this point it may make things simpler. At least we wouldn't have to change to the technology of the week.
Just a few days ago there was an article on here about how Valve was able to get higher frame rates using Linux with X than they could get with Windows. This suggests to me that X is working just fine. Maybe it's bigger than it needs to be, but it's also performing better than local-only solutions. It seems to me that Valve's tests shoot a bit of a hole in the argument for Wayland.
Not that I'm opposed to Wayland itself. Maybe it will bring something new/better to the table. I just don't see a need for it when X is performing so well.
I don't really see much of a case of throwing the house out just to get "butter smooth" GUI, as far as I can tell linux GUIs has been good enough since quite some time, I have yet to see tearing or any graphical problems with firefox like in the "old" days even with many tabs open. While its nice to optimize the stack we loose a few things, first we distance linux yet again from all other Unix-like systems (BSD, like with ALSA vs OSS), then there is driver support, as far as I can see there is no planned support for Wayland from Nvidia or AMD on their proprietary drivers, we are back to square one, with an "exotic" architecture with no full support for modern graphics hardware (OSS vs Proprietary aside), way to go.
As a coder and enthusiast Wayland sounds fantastic, but the reality is that wayland has long long way to go, I personally don't see the need for it.
C-x C-c
Try running an X App that does any significant amount of OpenGL/DirectRendering. Try running it remotely. Not.
I agree I am intrigued by these host files how do I sign up for your newsletter?
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Although some of the benefits seem compelling, I just have to ask:
How is it that in the case of display, we're supposed to drink the Mark Shuttleworth Koolaid that network display is bad.
But in the case of sound, we're told that network sound is good. Need I remind anyone of the pain associated with PulseAudio?
We were told it was for our own benefit, because, hey, you can pipe sound across the network! So suck it up.
But, now, network is bad.
It seems the only constant is: What ever Mark says is the tablets from Mt. Sinai.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog