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."

Comments

What the hell is Wayland?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I know I can Google, but a one sentence description would've made the summary far more useful.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wayland is an attempt to remove the network transparency of X... in a world where everything is networked.

Some people might consider this utterly retarded.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[fikx]

I just realized why I ignore Wayland: every comment in favor of Wayland, somewhere in the comment, will have the same fallacy about the network feature of X being a problem. Myself and lots of others user the remote X feature on a regular basis. I and thousands of IT professional use remote access constantly on other platforms, mainly windows. Using any of the remote technologies available for windows makes me grind my teeth constantly since I was ruined by using X first and know how it should work instead of what I have to use every day. I assume I'm not alone or even just part of a small crowd in that respect..
If there's some good sources for the % of users who don't want it, that's fine. quote 'em and I'm glad to read up on it. But, most times I hear just claimed lack of need for it when I know at least for myself and many others remote X is one of the most valuable features in X. If there was at least SOME info on Wayland that either left off the comments about how bad remote X is or showed some facts to back the claim, I'd pay more attention. Unfortunately I've seen no comment yet for Wayland that does more than say "I don't know of anyone who uses remote X, so most users don't use it"
And, one day Wayland may actually catch on and take over the desktop in Unix. Now matter how good it is, it will be a sad day since a useful piece of functionality is thrown away when it used to be included for for free (free in terms of performance cost, free in terms of setup, free in terms of no effort needed for developers to support it, etc.). Doesn't make it easy to look forward to Wayland right now. This comment was at least less inflammatory than most and the rest of the comment was very informative, but I still would like just once for someone to back the claims against the network feature since I value myself quite a bit and have heard many others say the same.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[nurb432]

For those of us who use the network transparency of X11, its a attempt to 'return' to a simpler less functional time where your windowing sub-system assumed that you were all alone and had no friends.

A throwback, an abomination. It should have never been allowed to get this far, and the people responsible taken out back and 'dealt with.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[MBCook]

Wayland supports X11 in the same way OS X does. There is an X server running as a Wayland client. It would work like a normal X server, doing all it's own compositing, etc., and then send the output to Wayland to be composited with all the other programs/windows.

If you launch the X client, normal X programs should continue to work.

I believe they specifically decided not to even try to make Wayland network transparent. I think you'd either have to run the program on the remote host and transfer everything VNC style, or implement your own GUI/processing separation and handle the networking between the two yourself.

There are people who use X forwarding, you're obviously one. I believe Wayland was designed from the ground up to make things easier for the client.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[fippo]

you already generally have to use something like VNC or xpra (layered over X, not really using it) in order to get reasonable performance or to detach and reattach remotely. X might seem like the answer until you try to use it... it isn't good enough because it's nowhere near usable as GNU screen.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[jbolden]

I agree that the "unneeded and unused" is BS. The people who support Wayland are proposing eliminating network transparency in exchange for other advantages having to do with higher refresh rates. I agree with you it would be more honest to just say they believe on balance this is the right trade off. X existed when most modern GUIs which made the same tradeoffs were built. Wayland supporters are just saying that Commodore, Microsoft, Apple, IBM (OS/2),... were right and SGI, Sun, Digital, HP, IBM (AIX).. were wrong in figuring out the right balance of features. Wayland supporters are basically saying that ultimately, even in 2012, its all about ramming as many triangles through the video card as possible, and doing that with predictable timings; that anything that slows down those triangles, like networking must go overboard.

Similarly X has 30 year history of really really doing a bad job of delivering a smooth GUI experience. That while in theory the network protocol shouldn't cost much, in practice it often seems to complicate design tremendously. X supporters IMHO and experience have trouble often admitting how many GUI projects fail or take 10x longer than they should because of the complexity of working with the X / multiple window manager / multi GUI stack.

If everyone were putting their cards on the table, then we could have an honest conversation about tradeoffs. Because X servers can run on top of X it might be possible to even come to an agreement about which applications should remain network transparent and which shouldn't. I suspect most supporters of network transparency could care less if games and video editing software went local only. And I suspect that most supporters of wayland could care less if server monitoring and server installation software remained X forever. Longer term though the tradeoffs become real. Gnome and KDE will either be built around Wayland or built around X, its going to be impossible for them to do both well. If around Wayland then Linux will be a system of local GUIs with at best a few networkable applications. If around X then Wayland will be a hack run in place of the GUI or only in full screen mode, for real time rendering.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[Anonymous Coward]

No drama queen, just pointing out that the reason for getting rid of X11 is bovine excrement. Wayland is a shiny new thing for the sake of new shiny thing for those who spend their time making new themes for Gnome/KDE and think it's heavy duty programming. The same people who ask why Math is required for a CS degree, because they never have used it. Yeah I need to insert a piece of borken linux software in between the hardware and X11 so I can spend my time figuring out what's wrong with Wayland rather than keeping the network/cluster running and doing the coding I should be doing.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[grumbel]

I just don't get why they are so keen to get rid off that faeture...

They are not. This is not about replacing X, it's simply about splitting the graphics and input code out of X and moving it over to the kernel and Wayland. You can still run X11 apps under Wayland. So it's really more a pragmatic approach to getting the Xorg code based cleaned up, then an abandonment of network transparencey.

Also in general X11 network transparency is bit overrated in my opinion, as while it is good for things such as basic thin client computing, it is completely useles for basic everyday uses like screen sharing or moving applications from one display to another. It's also rather useless for multimedia, be it video due to the lack of bandwidth or sound due to the X11 simply not handling sound. Wayland won't solve them, but a clean code base means that it will be easier for other people to attack those problems.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[jedidiah]

Nope. While a small minority of loud retards were repeating other people's outdated arguments, most of the rest of the world recreated the network transparency of X. Now you have a corporate environment where doing Unix-y things from 20 years ago is commonplace.

As much as I despise Windows, it does do the remote desktop thing well enough to be useful. I can't say the same for Macs.

The rest of the world has finally caught up with X. It's the people that want to dump X that are really living in the past.

It turns out that in a highly networked world, network transparency is actually a very handy thing. Dumping it just because you're an Apple wannabe is just stupid.

It wouldn't surprise me...

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:Anyone on /. Actually Use Ubuntu?

[jones_supa]

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.

Re:First Microsoft and now Canonical...

[Grishnakh]

Wayland has little to do with GUIs; it's the software layer underneath the graphics.

Re:Did the grownups prevail this time?

[oakgrove]

If Linux ever comes to dominate the desktop it'll be in some form that just comes out of nowhere the way Android did* and made Linux a huge force in the mobile space. Windows would be a lot harder to displace than the iPhone though.

*Yes to people on here Android was old hat by the time it actually appeared but to most consumers it just appeared out of nowhere one day in 2008.