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?

[Requiem18th]

Wel basically it's a display server, like X11/X.org, except it's optimized to run locally, unlike X11/X.org which has it's origins in networked environments and tries its best to work either locally or remotely.

Except that X has been tinkered to work for desktop systems for so long that there little of that network oriented code left around, yet W, or Wayland, tries to get rid of that aspect completely.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Except that X has been tinkered to work for desktop systems for so long that there little of that network oriented code left around, yet W, or Wayland, tries to get rid of that aspect completely.

From the 10,000 ft view it sure looks like wayland is just reinvention for reinvention's sake and is likely to run into a whole host of problems that X figured out 20+ years ago.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[MBCook]

Wayland is designed to fix a lot of the problems that X has. X, for historical reasons, does a TON of things. It has network transparency, it's responsible for input, for setting up the graphics card's memory and registers, drawing various primitive shapes, font rendering, etc.

But today 99% of the time people don't use the network transparency stuff in X, they run locally. But all sorts of memory has to be shuffled around. X mandates all sorts of bitmap formats that must be supported. Today the kernel, through KMS, can setup the graphics card. We have libraries like Cairo to draw basic shapes. Then there are all sorts of weird things that have been hacked into/onto X to support common features like resizing and rotating your desktop.

Wayland basically started with a blank slate. The kernel can setup the video card, so it won't do that. Most people don't use network transparency, so it doesn't do that (you can run an X client on Wayland, for when you still need the feature). The GUI toolkits and OpenGL libraries already draw everything, so it doesn't do that stuff.

LWN had an article from two years ago about what Wayland set out to accomplish. Things may have changed since there, here are two updates from LWN describing Wayland earlier this year.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically the idea of wayland is that by using the wayland libraries the window manager becomes the display server. There are no restrictions on how the window manager works, other than that it is a compositor. The end result is that you can have tiling window managers like Awesome but they will leverage the GPU a tiny bit for the rendering. From an end user perspective there is no reason you should see a change given that the devs are halfway competent.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[JesseMcDonald]

can Awesome be ported to Wayland itself, so that it manages X clients and native Wayland clients?

Yes, but with a twist. Wayland doesn't have window managers as a separate process. Instead of porting your preferred window manager to work with Wayland, one would implement the Wayland protocol support in the window manager, with help from libwayland for the common parts. Supposedly the Wayland support only requires about as much code as the boilerplate for an X window manager. Of course, X core rendering and XRender will be unavailable. If the WM already uses a portable library like Cairo, GTK+ or Qt for rendering that shouldn't be a problem; otherwise all the drawing code would need to be ported as well.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wayland was also home to the insane clone of the Jedi Master Joruus C'Baoth.

Just as an FYI, the Jedi master was Jorus C'Baoth. If memory serves, he was lost when his extragalactic exploration ship exploded.

His insane clone was named Joruus C'Baoth. It may be that the insane clone had an insane clone, but in that case the apparent naming convention would suggest that the clone's name would be Joruuus.

Just some memory flotsam from the late 90's that washed ashore when I saw your post...

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?

[dbc]

But what about native Wayland aps? (Is there such a thing?) Will I be able to run those across the network? (Asking, I don't know.) Like the GP, I use X over the network. If I can run *every* graphical ap on my machine over the network, then, sorry, no sale.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Wayland is meant to move X and other legacy stuffs out of the local rendering path, making X second-class (and optional) citizen. This is one (big) difference between Wayland and previous attempts is that it is actually meant to work with X. Rather than removing X, It replaces X's position from being the center of the rendering universe. I don't know if Wayland would succeed, but it would satisfy both the network transparency AND the local desktop crowd. It seems like a very sane way to progress to me since I don't believe you'd want to run a lot of composite apps over X network protocol anyway. I think Wayland deserves the hype for what they're trying to accomplish.

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?

[fikx]

There's no question remote X has issues. Like you say, the networks and computing environment of today give X a lot of challenge. My big push and the original complaint in this thread is that every Wayland comment includes the remark that remote app usage is not important enough to be a base feature. I disagree and get tired of someone saying the feature is useless when I know it's not.
Right now, there are work arounds for the issues X has, but they are still work arounds. What X does needs to be done better and can be. Extra software and better coding of the X apps can go a long way, but there are limits. If someone wanted start from scratch and recreate a window system, I'm not opposed to that. I just disagree with the remote/network feature being called unneeded and unused. Wayland comments always seem to do that, and usually (not always) follow up with statements from people who do not use it and/or do not understand how it works.

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?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Well, No, yes and maybe. FAQ is useful. http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[whoever57]

But in the end, X network transparency doesn't work very well over Wan. It doesn't work very well over MPLS. In general it doesn't work all that well for the situations where you couldn't just be using some sort of remote solution.

X works very well over a LAN, and, as bandwidth becomes cheaper, problems running over a WAN will go away.

X wasn't able to handle the security problems and so the whole infrastructure of remote X and remote shells has gotten more complex and thus less useful.

Now you are showing that you are out of touch. Tunneling X over SSH resolves the security problems and makes things much more simple (no more "xhost +" ). Over the LAN, I see no lag when using remote X tunneled over SSH.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[whoever57]

The Wayland developers have repeatedly said they will support network transparency. Stop being a fucking drama queen.

Their FAQ disagrees with you:

Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

No, that is outside the scope of Wayland.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[ais523]

ssh -X has some restrictions for security reasons. If you trust the other end, try using ssh -Y instead, which lets it do things like run code on the local GPU (which OpenGL probably cares about).

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[mellyra]

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

I just don't get why they are so keen to get rid off that faeture... When I was in uni (just four years ago) our department had a powerful Sun server that mostly powered the computer lab's thin clients but also allowed ssh access from the outside. Being able to log into that server via ssh with X forwarding and run Maple, Mathematica, ... was awesome and saved me the expense of getting any of that software myself.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[dkf]

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.

Quite apart from the fact that terminals are a heck of a lot simpler than a GUI system, there are plenty of cases where high performance and detaching simply aren't needed. So what if the program goes away when you close the connection? You can run it again when you connect again, no problem. That's worked fine for all the cases in the past 5 years where I've needed remote X (such as installing engineering simulators or running certain types of performance monitors).

But the fact that you're comparing X11 to screen merely indicates that you're an insightless noob. Me? There's a lot about X11 that I don't like and there are some design decisions that are starting to look like really bad limitations, but that's because I've actually written toolkit code that uses X11; I know where many of the bodies are buried. Yet instead of kicking at the open door, you're trying to attack X11's strengths.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[Lennie]

Basically every program currently uses compositing (sometimes the toolkit/libraries does it for the program) or can easily do so.

Compositing seems to be the most efficient way to do it, but compositing was something that was added later to X as an extension.

They want to get rid of everything else in X and just use compositing as everything else can already be handled by the Linux kernel (this means wayland won't work for Unix as I understand it).

X just has a whole lot of legacy code and some overhead.

The reason why it is possible to build Wayland (replacing X is really big task) is because Wayland just does this small thing, compositing and all the other stuff can be handled by other parts of the system because in the years support for that has been added to the kernel or toolkit-libraries and so on.

The reason why Wayland does not do networking... is because again, other systems can handle that. RDP, X11, SPICE and even VNC.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[gaelfx]

Nice job clipping that response to suit your needs. If you bothered to read the second paragraph:

This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.

Now, call me crazy, but isn't a large part of Linux about the user being able to choose how their machine does the work that they ask it to do? It seems to me Wayland isn't trying to force anything on anyone, rather, just trying to open up more choices that would otherwise be limited.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[jbolden]

X works very well over a LAN, and, as bandwidth becomes cheaper, problems running over a WAN will go away

Its not generally a problem of bandwidth alone. Even with tons of bandwidth latency is a problem over WAN. IPv6 will make that somewhat better by reducing latency. Moving to fiber will make it somewhat better. On the other hand introducing more satellite, over the air, and wifi will make it worse. Now an MPLS will solve jitter but if jitter it gets even worse.

Now you are showing that you are out of touch. Tunneling X over SSH resolves the security problems and makes things much more simple (no more "xhost +" ). Over the LAN, I see no lag when using remote X tunneled over SSH.

SSH adds latency on both sides. Try doing 1080p real time video over SSH, and manipulate it and you'll notice some lag.:)

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[olau]

Have you any actual experience with a networked server? The actual protocol is easy enough to do. Sending data from one party to another and parse it is easy.

The real problem is that you go from a situation where all components can talk to each other quickly to a situation where everything you do must be carefully analysed because each time you cross the boundary between local and remote you take a possibly big hit from latency and possibly also bandwidth if it's a lot of data.

I have a Master's degree in distributed systems, and the mere term "network-transparent" is probably a fallacy. In face of the huge performance implications of a network, the local-remote split most likely has to be explicit in some way, just like it is with web. Unless you don't crappy performance.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[jbolden]

In my experience, the hard parts of making GUI code are dealing with multiple platforms (why would you want to write code for a single platform?) and going from functional-but-dull to snazzy-and-usable. The networking side of things (or not) is nowhere on that map.

I don't write software where I have to push large numbers of frames through per second either. On the other hand I use software where large numbers of frames per second matter. Interestingly enough I just got the mac retina. Because the retina is doing virtual adjustments (i.e. there are several virtual screens being drawn to by applications and those those are re-rendered to another virtual screen which gets pushed to the physical screen) I could easily see frame rate problems in even day to applications like video inside a web browser while scrolling before the driver improvements in OSX 10.8. What Apple did in 10.8 to get rid of those problems, would be impossible under X.

Kristian Høgsberg who wrote a lot of the X acceleration you are probably using was the one who started Wayland. He was frustrated about what he couldn't do. Under X applications are not able to control rendering. They cannot make decisions required to avoid visible tearing. They cannot force the X client to draw potential windows in advance to avoid lag.

Another problem is either the client and server (to use X terminology) share a video memory buffer or they don't. If they don't you pick up a lot of time passing information between them. Your CPU is probably no more than a few gigabytes per second, that is the maximum speed you can get data from one buffer to another under best conditions. And with screens that are 5 mega pixel x 4 bytes of color per pixel, every one way trip is is 1/100th of a second under perfect conditions. You aren't getting perfect conditions and 2 round trips is common. And if X wanted to implement something like the resolution system Apple for retina then it would be worse (though the CPU speed for memory is likely about double) because you could be rendering virtual screens as large as 14 megapixel with some round trip being 4 hops.... you could be talking flicker over 1/10th of a second.

I hope these two examples help. They have a good discussion: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[EvilNTUser]

If everyone were putting their cards on the table, then we could have an honest conversation about tradeoffs.

Sometimes it seems like people don't even know what cards they're holding. All these arguments are missing the point from a usability perspective.

When I type "ssh -X", I don't actually care what protocol is used. All I care about is that it works on every single computer *by default*. The solution is obvious: modify the Wayland spec to demand that every system that implements Wayland also includes VNC integrated with SSH. Problem solved, everyone can be happy.

Yes, performance won't be exactly the same, the specified protocol might not end up being VNC, etc. but these endless arguments about Wayland are much worse. We have the software to implement this, so let's just please standardize on *something* so we have usable systems out of the box. It's not going to prevent someone from manually installing a better network protocol in the future, so Wayland trying to remain neutral on network protocols is just ideological posturing.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[jbolden]

modify the Wayland spec to demand that every system that implements Wayland also includes VNC integrated with SSH. Problem solved, everyone can be happy.

I don't know if it should be part of the spec nor do I know if Wayland can demand anything but...

I think that's a great idea for a strong suggestion! Wayland be default should support VNC. ssh by default should use vnc (-v is taken, I think -X should remain with X11/X12 but I have no problem with -Z which is free). That solves most of the problem. I agree with you 100% FWIW.

Hopefully the distributions do this. This sounds like something RedHat (or interestingly enough Apple, which is big on VNC) might go for.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[Hatta]

What overhead? Show me the data that suggests that network transparency is what slows down X, and not the bloated toolkits people use (and will still use on Wayland). When X is used locally, it's as fast as anything else.

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.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[jedidiah]

Here is a perfect demonstration of the "clueless retard" mentality in this discussion. Running X on top of Wayland doesn't help you. It's like running X on Windows or running X on MacOS. It only allows you to run those apps still coded to use X.

Running X on Wayland doesn't allow me to run Wayland apps remotely.

It's just like how running X on a Mac doesn't allow me to run iTunes on one of my Linux boxes.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

X works very well over a LAN, and, as bandwidth becomes cheaper, problems running over a WAN will go away.

No, it won't. The problem with X over a WAN is latency, and no amount of technology is going to change the fact that light can only go so fast.

The company I work for has a *very* fast WAN between offices, and X over the WAN is still a dog. The problem is that X is to a large degree synchronous, and operations involve multiple round trips. So no matter how much bandwidth you have, you get killed by latency.

The solution to this is to either use a framebuffer-based protocol (VNC and friends) or to use an asynchronous compressing X (NX). Neither of which is really taking advantage of the network features of X.

Re:What the hell is Wayland?

[whoever57]

The solution to this is to either use a framebuffer-based protocol (VNC and friends) or to use an asynchronous compressing X (NX). Neither of which is really taking advantage of the network features of X.

Actually, the solution is a combination of X and VNC. I have a persistent VNC session on the LAN, to which I send the display from mulitple X11 apps running on many differnet machines, and then, I connect to the VNC session either over the LAN or over the Internet (VPN or tunnelled over SSH).

The idea of multiple VNC sessions, one on each machine that I would run an X program, but cannot if Wayland replaces X, is complete FAIL.

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I see a screenshot of Wayland, I see rotated windows. Is that its only feature?

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/screenshots.html

Try harder.

Re:Sigh

[nzac]

It's so far from ready, this is what its currently achieving. When you are remaking a compositor from the begging these are significant steps.

I have been waiting from this announcement from Ubuntu since they said they were trying to use it next release. It might be close to being ok for a 2d no accel window manager but trying to run unity was never happening in 6 months.

Did the grownups prevail this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Did the grownups prevail this time?

[lister king of smeg]

way more pragmatic answer, if they switch to wayland they will piss of valve who is working on porting their games onto ubuntu. they piss of valve there will be no games, as a consequence there will be no year of the linux desktop for a long time. linux as a big force in the desktop space is ubuntu's goal. so no xserver means no valve means no steam no games and now no games.

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.

Re:Did the grownups prevail this time?

[MBCook]

My understanding of Wayland says that it wouldn't bother Valve at all.

If you use a toolkit that has been ported to Wayland, you use the toolkit and nothing changes.

If you use a toolkit that hasn't been ported, you'd just run the X server that runs as a Wayland client, so things keep working.

But the important thing is running OpenGL, which works just fine in Wayland (which is built on OpenGL).

Unless Valve is writing their own rendering directly against X (which seems like it would be an idiotic thing to do in general, especially considering Wayland has been coming for over 2 years), I wouldn't think this would really effect them. In fact, they could decide to go Wayland only (assuming it's done enough at that point) and avoid whatever hassle X might have given them.

Re:Did the grownups prevail this time?

[oakgrove]

And of course I typed Linus' name as "Linux". *facepalm*

Just be patient

[asmkm22]

Things will get better once the Yutani Corporation enters the picture.

Re:Anyone on /. Actually Use Ubuntu?

[icebraining]

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.

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.

Not any more

[quixote9]

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.

Re:First Microsoft and now Canonical...

[Grishnakh]

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

Why not replace X11 with... nothing?

[JDG1980]

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?

Re:Why not replace X11 with... nothing?

[agrif]

This is almost exactly what Wayland is doing. Wayland is a communication protocol between compositors and the things they composite: usually, between window managers and applications. This means that the window manager is responsible for communicating with applications, and for pushing video data on to the screen (via OpenGL + Kernel Mode Setting). So instead of launching X, then launching a window manager on top of that, you just launch the window manager.

This is the primary advantage of Wayland: it's simple. Really really simple. It's basically just OpenGL and a protocol for delegating render surfaces to other applications (to render on to using OpenGL). By comparison, an X server needs font rendering, shape rendering, and a ton of other things that aren't used today anyway because everyone uses freetype and cairo and such. Wayland leaves those out and expects you to get that from other places (like, say, freetype and cairo).

(Wayland is also the name of a C library implementing the Wayland protocol. The Wayland project also produces the Weston compositor, as a reference implementation of a simple "window manager".)

Re:But what does it give us?

[agrif]

Everything that Wayland does is possible under X, it just might be hard to write the X code to do it.

The biggest point to Wayland is that it is extremely simple (compared to X... X is huge), and it's capable of doing 95% of what people use X for. The other 5% is network transparency, a feature I hold dearly but one that I acknowledge not many people care about.

So what's so great about simple? For one, it's easier to maintain. It's also easier to write clients for, since it's almost entirely OpenGL (the Wayland part is small). The X library is a horrible horrible thing, and I would die happy if I never have to use it again.

VNC

[flyingfsck]

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...