Wayland 1.0 Released, Not Yet Ready To Replace X11

An anonymous reader writes "After being talked about for four years, Wayland 1.0 was released today. The Wayland 1.0 release doesn't mark it yet as being ready for Linux desktop usage but just being API/protocol stable for future expansion. Wayland will now maintain backwards compatibility going forward, but how much longer will it take to replace X11 on the Linux desktop? Quite a while seems likely."

Comments

How long?

[whoever57]

but how much longer will it take to replace X11 on the Linux desktop? Quite a while seems likely."

Try never. Yes, I know that it should be possible to write a Wayland client that provides X11 server capability, but in that case, it is the Wayland client that is replacing X11, not Wayland.

Seriously, though, the Wayland effort appears to be throwing out every advantage the X11 display had over the Windows display for a replacement that will probably never be quite as good as a Windows. I just hope that developers of programs which currently support X11 continue to support X11, or my life will get much more difficult. In fact, for much of what I do, without X11 support (and only Wayland display supported), I would probably be better off with a Windows desktop instead of a Linux desktop.

Re:Good enough for Ubuntu

[socceroos]

Yep, the issue with constantly pushing forwards and looking for the next new thing means that you can periodically make a bad choice. Shuttleworth, while some of his descisions haven't been the best, has been instrumental in pushing the Linux desktop to where it is today. Linux has never enjoyed so many desktop users. That brings good and bad, but its still an overall positive.

Application and Screen on Different Machines

[billstewart]

The important feature about X Windows was Network Transparency - You could run an application on one computer with its screen output and keyboard and mouse input on a different computer. Sure, there are other ways to do it - lots of ssh sessions, or web browsing (especially with AJAX etc.), or competing window systems like NeWS, or screen emulators like VNC and Windows Remote Desktop - but fundamentally it's a lot cleaner to have some kind of network-transparent window system than to have an application need to drive a "screen" on its own machine.

25 years later, do we still need this? Yes! Virtual machines are taking over the computer business, so you can't expect the application to be running on your desktop (even if it _is_ running in a VM on top of your desktop), screens are a wide range of different sizes and capabilities (laptops, tablets, big monitors, etc., which often don't resemble the machine the app is running on), web browsers are getting used in increasingly complex ways because Windows didn't have a convenient X interface, and there's more and more ugliness around, and more waste of resources trying to emulate things that X did adequately well.

There are lots of good reasons to replace X, but Network Transparency is still the core feature, even if you want the application to have more control over the screen and its associated hardware than we had back in the 1980s, or if you want to move processing functions to different points between the client and the server (e.g. NeWS and NeXT's Display Postscript did some things differently, and Plan 9 and its successors had their own opinions about how to implement everything), but if Wayland doesn't offer Network Transparency yet, it's not an adequate X replacement.

Re:Application and Screen on Different Machines

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself. I was just using the 'network transparency' features of X the other day, as well as NAS (Network Audio System) and going 'thank god this made it so easy!'

Literally all you had to do was have the nasd daemon running on the client and fire up the app on the server. Same deal with X. I was able to spit out my app with full audio across the network. I wouldn't want to try Quake or something over it, but I'm sure that given some work on X11 and 10G ethernet I could probably do that as well.

Honestly my problems at the moment are less with Wayland and more with them constantly fucking things up on the X11 front with the incessant streams of changes and deprecated features. In order to run MESA now you have to have a c++ compiler, and can't use any hardware other than Intel, AMD, or Nvidia (via nouveau) since all have been deprecated due to the removal of DRI1. Additionally despite YEARS of opportunity, there's still no inline way to have apps change display resolutions, so for those of us with 8/16 bit games we can't just fire them up, we have to run them in a dedicated 8 or 16 bit color X server, which oh by the way the latter doesn't work on any supported 3d hardware (MAYBE MAYBE R100/R200, although bother of those drivers are somewhat unreliable nowadays), and oh by the way we broke 8 bit palette support, so the former is in greyscale even on color displays (I ran into this after upgrading X on one of my laptops with an IGP345 on it. Horribly slow at 16/32 bit color, but with lots of 8 bit apps that'll run smooth).

It's not wayland that's FUBAR, it's how they've been handling X for the past however many years that is. They keep talking about 'improving' on X, but they can't even keep X displaying the same features it had 10 years ago due to inadequate testing, so what do you expect them to do in another 5 years when wayland is really 'mature'? Break more shit because it didn't matter to them and tack on new crap you don't care about.

That's just my 2c as an X user since the late 90s, having followed Utah-GLX, the starting of Mesa, The XF86/Xorg schism, and all the BS since.

Re:Application and Screen on Different Machines

[tibit]

It goes the other way: unless you design for network transparency from day one, you're not going to get it and have it perform well. There's no way to decently get network transparency as a layer on top of the window system. VNC and RDP are horrible kludges and perform like crap.

Re:Why are graphics awesome on Android?

[ADRA]

Google invested a lot of money to get their Application client stacks to work very well with a sane OpenGL implementation, and OEM's shipping Android make sure that there are sane OpenGL implementations on Linux. The later cannot be said for any of the desktop players that have dropped the ball due to lack of interest for well over a decade.

Android proves that graphics on Linux can be quite successful functional, but it also proves at how little interest existing industry heavy weights have at supporting Linux in general. The question now looms, can AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and co continually give half hearted attempts at supporting Linux when their markets are now in more danger than they ever have before? Can they continually look a blind eye to one of the fastest growing consumer electronics segments in a long while? Time will tell, and the drivers (and standards bodies) will be the tell tale sign that they can truely embrase a world outside Windows PC's.