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More From Canonical Employee On: "Why Mir?"
An anonymous reader writes "Canonical Desktop and Mobile Engineer Christopher Halse Rogers explains in more detail the decision for Mir as apposed to Wayland. Although Halse Rogers 'was not involved in the original decision to create Mir,' he's had 'discussions with those who were.' 'We want something like Wayland, but different in almost all the details.' 'The upsides of doing our own thing — we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review.' In a separate post Halse Rogers answer the question: Does this fragment the Linux graphics driver space?"
"Does this fragment the Linux graphics driver space?"
No. That's the point of DRM and KMS. X11, Wayland, DirectFB, Mir, Xynth, whatever all share the same kernel drivers and userspace display and graphics libraries.
Really? Are we not even going to try to pretend to give a shit anymore?
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
...This decision was entirely based on NIH (Not in House) Syndrome...
NIH = Not Invented Here
Unfortunately the grandparent has NIH, so he had to reinvent the acronym.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Your assertion that Wayland will not go anywhere seems to be predicated on the incorrect assumptions that Wayland is born of naïvety (it's not; it's developed by people with a LOT of real experience working on the current X-centric stack), and that it needs to entirely supplant X to succeed (it doesn't; it deliberately does a lot less, and it can host a rootless X server, and indeed this is the only realistic use case for it on regular desktop distributions for the next couple of years).
Yes, there are many projects that are started for the reasons you describe, and go on to fail for those same reasons. But Wayland is not one of them. That is not to say that its success is guaranteed—but rather only that your reasons to assume its failure is inevitable are invalid.
Wayland does not need to destroy decades of compatibility. In fact, its approach is quite the opposite: to maximize compatibility initially (pass almost everything through to a rootless X server with XWayland if you want), and then offer an optional smooth migration path away from X for applications that don't need its complexity, would like to push the complexity into separate components, or would like to take advantage of some of the things that you simply can't achieve with X today, e.g., flicker-free from boot, to playing a game, and then on to playing hardware-accelerated videos.
You concede that the current state of video drivers being too tightly tied to X is terrible, so I assume you agree that the work has to be done to resolve that at some point, whatever path we collectively take. That also happens to be the only thing I'm aware of that's really holding Wayland back from mainstream use today. Everything else is just little bits and pieces that need to be finished or polished up, and then it could be dropped in to real general purpose distros.
Doesn't come more meta than that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Wayland is being developed by the same people behind X.org. 99.9% of the people lambasting Wayland have no idea what it is, what it's going to accomplish or how entrenched it already is.
Wayland is the future. It will take some time to get everything in place but it's already in play and many other project from the kernel to window managers are already moving towards implementing the plumbing necessary. Given this is slashdot I'm not particularly surprised by the ignorance, nor that people think something as complex as a complete rewrite of the GUI could be accomplished in weeks nor am I surprised that no one has bothered to actually learn about wayland and what it is but frankly the hatred is a bit surprising given the total ignorance. People hate software they know nothing about because they are afraid of change, it's just silly.
You think they would at least try to learn what it is given that almost all the people behind it are the same people behind X.org.
Everybody says "ooh noooo don't kill remote X windows! it's the best!"
except for one thing: IT SUCKS.
Have you ever tried to actually USE remote X? It's just beyond horrible.
The failure is that X was designed for low-latency between the display and the application, and that use case is just not very useful.
In reality the display and the application are connected over a high-latency link and X is UNUSABLE in this context.
VNC does not assume a low-latency link and so it remains responsive and pleasant even over a crappy ADSL connection.
Go ahead and TRY to use Firefox remotely over your ISP connection. It's just a pathetic joke and you will kill it out of frustration before even a single page loads.
Try the exact same thing with a VNC connection and it works just fine.
Not many people were bitching when Google went a lot farther than this with every aspect of Android
There's a small difference: Google wasn't a two-bit Linux shop with a chronic lack of cash.
Android was a two-bit Linux shop with a chronic lack of cash UNTIL GOOGLE BOUGHT THEM
There is a great Slashdot post from one of the developers of Quartz around 2001 about why they chose to reinvent the wheel instead of using X11. The problem is, none of his criticisms applies to X.org circa 2006 or later. It was shown, by counterexample, that it was possible to add all of the missing features that Apple wanted to X11, without breaking backwards compatibility. And, as part of their rewrite, they lost some separation of concerns and they lost compatibility with X11 applications except via an ugly (visually) compatibility layer. The latter wasn't a problem for Apple, because they didn't want to be running X11 apps, they wanted people to write new Cocoa apps. It is a problem for a system attempting to take advantage of the large corpus of existing X11 apps.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
We could have had a modern display server years ago with XGL/Xegl. But it was killed off because Red Hat and nVidia didn't like.
The disagreement was purely technical.
The XGL approach caused a bunch of peformance problems for various rendering scenarios (stereo3d, overlays like video) - XGL forced everything through a pixmap to be rendered by GL.
No acceleration using the GPU for video / scaling or anything else.
XGL was cool because it was first and everyone got googly eyed at the effects. It probably was a catalyst in getting the right solution (AIGLX), too.
Wayland is being developed by the same people behind X.org.
So? Xorg is boring. It doesn't need to change all that fast. It's not new and interesting. Careful improvements is far less funt than nuking it and starting again. Just because they develop Xorg doesn't mean they're not hopelessly biased for other reasons.
99.9% of the people lambasting Wayland have no idea what it is, what it's going to accomplish or how entrenched it already is.
Then enilghten us.
Wayland is the future.
I hope not.
It will take some time to get everything in place but it's already in play and many other project from the kernel to window managers are already moving towards implementing the plumbing necessary.
WTF? You really have no clue. The kernel side stuff is just for graphics and works as well with X11 as anything else. Secondly for "plumbing" there is no plu8mbing for window managers. WMs are replaced entirely by the compositor. None of the X11 WMs will work. It's a completely different architecture.
Given this is slashdot I'm not particularly surprised by the ignorance,
Is the irony intended.
nor am I surprised that no one has bothered to actually learn about wayland and what it is but frankly the hatred is a bit surprising given the total ignorance. People hate software they know nothing about because they are afraid of change, it's just silly.
Change is not always good, especially when it's for the better. Wayland looses us network transparency. So far all the counters to this tell me that (a) I'm lieing and I don't really want it (b) it can be hacked on after a la VNC and (c) it can be hacked on at the toolkit level providing a delightful level of inconsistency.
Those are not good arguments. (a) is particularly insulting.
You think they would at least try to learn what it is given that almost all the people behind it are the same people behind X.org.
And these are the user-hostile numpties who have come up with some really dubious decisions of late.
For instance, nixing the "kill active grab" keystroke, because it shouldn't be needed because it's caused by buggy programs. I mean WTF? How is that any comfort when some buggy program locks up the X server again and I have to switch to a console and try to kill it (if I can even find which one).
And they've decided that the Wayland policy is to have client side decorations "because it will allow consistend window decorations". The last point is an outright lie---it cannot be explained by incompetence. So in addition to having inconsistent decorations (from each toolkit, unlike now), hung windows will be immovable.
But that's OK because that's an application bug and apparently those don't ever happen. Especially not to developers.
Oh and then there's the persistent lie about X11 on Wayland. It's a lie because it's a half truth intended to decieve which probably makes it even worse. Of course you can run X11 on it. You can run X11 on a dead mouse, OS9/8/7/6 OSX, Win95, DOS Win 3.11 and modern Windows. That doesn't mean the user experience will be integrated and it doesn't mean that thw Wayland programs get the same advantages.
I wouldn't mind Wayland nearly so much if the creators (who also apparently had a lot to do with X) weren't such blantant FUD machines. If they're demonstrably lieing about a system they know in detail then it gives the feeling that they're really messing things up.
That and they've taken a really user hostile turn recently.
The thing is, thatWayland could be quite useful for multiplexing consoles and X11 sessions (if you care about graphical transitions between them, which I manifestly do not). But it's being sold very forcefully as a replacement general windowing system and due to the design lacks a number of really important feautres. If I have to choose between fancy transitions to ctrl+alt+f1 and remote windowing, I and many other slashdotters would choose the latter in a heartbeat.
And that is why there is so much hate for Wayland here: it's been earned.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Wayland is being developed by the same people behind X.org.
That explains my number one complaint about Wayland: the documentation is terrible. Truly awful. I mean this in a very specific way: there is insufficient information there to tell me how I could get a surface on which I could render things, and there is insufficient information there to permit me to do an independent reimplementation of the client library. My only recourse would be to read the source code, but right now that doesn't seem to help either. (Sure, I could connect and probably get a surface, but I have no idea what I could do with that surface or how I would change the handle into something that some other library could draw on.) There's just too much information missing, and that's about par for the course with anything produced by the folks from X.org; they can code cleanly enough, but they can't document critical info.
I am a GUI toolkit maintainer. I'm not porting anything away from X11 for now because I just don't see enough of a platform to port to. (Some bits are probably there. Some definitely aren't. I have other things to do as well as filling out gaping holes in others' critical info.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Canonical is behaving very "weird" lately.
This is an interview with Jonathan Riddell, the lead on Kubuntu [1].
Quotes:
"I only had contact with the Linux Mint developer recently when Canonical claimed that they needed a licence to use the compiled packages from Ubuntu. This is a dangerous misunderstanding of copyright licencing from a company which should understand it. I advised Linux Mint to say some rude things to Canonical but I think they're too polite for that."
"Canonical has the trademark of Kubuntu so they had to get a trademark licence from Canonical which took many months of long and slow negotiations. It was very frustracting to have Canonical be the blocker for part of the Ubuntu community since Canonical should be an enabler for the Ubuntu community (at least when we don't compete directly). So we did look at changing the name of Kubuntu but were told by Mark we'd be kicked out the project if we did that which would be a worst case scenario for everyone."
"Since then Canonical has started asking for donations when downloading Ubuntu and one option is to give "Better support for flavours like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu Slider thumb". Kubuntu has never received any of these funds or seen any better support, so this is a disappointing case of fraud."
[1] http://www.muktware.com/5369/how-will-changes-ubuntu-affect-kubuntu-exclusive-interview-jonathan-riddell