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GNOME Aiming For Full Wayland Support by Spring 2014

Posted by Unknown on from the ten-little-kingdoms dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical's plan to develop the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu rather than going with their original plans to adopt Wayland has been met with criticism from KDE (and other) developers... The GNOME response to Ubuntu's Mir is that they will now be rushing support for the GNOME desktop on Wayland. Over the next two release cycles they plan to iron out the Wayland support for the GNOME Shell, the GTK+ toolkit, and all GNOME packages so that by this time next year you can be running GNOME entirely on Wayland while still having X11 fall-back support."

20 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. It's ironic... by wertigon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, by creating MIR Ubuntu contributed to Wayland by giving the Gnome devs a big kick in the butt?

    Well played, Canonical, well played! :)

    And for the record, as long as both MIR and Wayland are more or less interoperable I don't care what's behind the hood. Both are open source and will be solid by the time they come out, so may the best implementation win. A little competition every now and then is just healthy.

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    1. Re:It's ironic... by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      For the record, as long as whatever display system we settle on provides network transparency for all applications, I don't care what's behind the hood.

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    2. Re:It's ironic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      For the record, as long as whatever display system we settle on provides network transparency for all applications, I don't care what's behind the hood.

      I can't adequately express how sick I am of hearing people demand such a niche feature.

    3. Re:It's ironic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      For the record, you're insisting that you bring forward obsolete mechanisms that 99.99% of end users will never use. Nobody outside a handful of sysadmins uses X network transparency, and only then I suspect to stroke their own egos.

      Cluestick:
      However inelegant or inefficient framebuffer-forwarding schemes like RDP and VNC may seem, their flexibility and ease of use (and not to mention cross-platform compatibility) makes them the defacto standards that they are.

    4. Re:It's ironic... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      True, though server side decorations are a must, too.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    5. Re:It's ironic... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is one of the things that really gets my goat about Wayland. People effectively kleep telling me that I don't do things that I do on a regular basis.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    6. Re:It's ironic... by caseih · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nah that's so boring! What I want is my Linux desktop to act like MS Windows where I cannot move applications if the app is frozen, because the decorations are all client-side. And while we're at it let's emulate the feature of Windows where you can't move a parent window around when a modal dialog box is being displayed!

      Yeah, then we'll finally have the year of the Linux Desktop!

    7. Re:It's ironic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      No one cares what you do. I'm saying that you are in a niche of people who do what you do and display server architecture should not be catered to you.

    8. Re:It's ironic... by malkavian · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why do you think Citrix did so well, and the whole application virtualisation stack? RDP and VNC are ok for some things, but they simply lack the power, elegance and utility of network transparency.

    9. Re:It's ironic... by Hatta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Then get the Wayland developers to guarantee that Wayland apps will be network transparent. Then we will shut up and you won't have to listen to us anymore. Until then, expect us to bitch every time Wayland is mentioned.

      You have three options:
      -provide network transparency
      -give up and go home
      -put up with constant bitching

      Your choice.

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    10. Re:It's ironic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And relying on a bloated 3d stack just to draw a damn window isn't a bottleneck?

      Face it, the only people that want to replace X which works JUST FINE are people who want to play with their goddamn wobbly windows. We get enough of that garbage with compositing, thanks.

    11. Re:It's ironic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is what I hear when I listen to X11 zealots:

      I DEMAND THE RIGHT TO USE MY 1988 MOTIF APPLICATION OVER A 28K modem connection AND FUCK ALL OF YOU WHO WANT A MODERN DESKTOP WITH A CODE BASE THAT CAN BE MAINTAINED AND IMPROVED.

    12. Re:It's ironic... by arth1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Re-introduce lbx. It worked fine before, until the new generation of devs didn't want to support it because they didn't use it and (quoting from memory) "bandwidth will catch up and won't be a problem".

      But even then, X without lbx or nix (which is just compression, which is better done outside) is far preferable to streaming the video output, especially for those of us who work on high latency lines (like intercontinental connections).
      VNC is hardly usable outside a LAN segment.
      ssh -X remotemachine "nedit filename" is a heck of a lot easer than to set up and wait for a VNC connection, and watch your typing being severely delayed as the video streams.

    13. Re:It's ironic... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Thanks to modern hardware, "thinking in 2D" is a bottleneck.

      Actually, no it's not any more.

      Modern graphics hardware is just a large bunch of stream processors coupled to some hardware perspective correct texture sampling units.

      These days forcing everything in 3D is no particular advantage. Graphics card can whale on 2D problems just as efficiently as 3D ones. It's just a question of writing some different shader programs.

      But you already knew that...

      So I really don't get your point.

      You seem to be saying that there is something fundemantal about X which prevents one from doing everything on the graphics card. There isn't. And there's no need to mess with fiddly window overlap stuff either. The BackingStore flag has been present since 1988, since even then the designers realised that it was worth keeping windows on the graphics card on advanced machines to avoid the irritating fiddling with overlaps and stuff.

      Seriously, it's been there for 25 years. X11 is actually designed to benefit from these kinds of things.

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    14. Re:It's ironic... by dabadab · · Score: 4, Insightful

      get the Wayland developers to guarantee that Wayland apps will be network transparent

      Well, I should quote the Wayland FAQ here:

      "Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

      No, that is outside the scope of Wayland."

      Really, everybody should read that and understand it, and also its consequences. Frankly, to me, the idea, that by switching to Wayland will somehow mean that you lose network transparency it just as absurd that by switching to X you lose OpenGL support (which is absolutely not a part of the X protocol - X11 came out in 1987, OpenGL in 1992). So while Wayland itself will not support network transparency, the full stack surely will.

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    15. Re:It's ironic... by DrXym · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No you can't. This is one of the #1 pieces of FUD about Wayland.

      It's not FUD, X11 can run over the top of Windows and OS X. For people whining about needing to run remote apps they can use X11 just as they do now. Or VNC. Or NX. Or whatever transport Wayland provides.

      So, how do I get an OSX app up on my Linux box over here using X11?

      You fail to comprehend. Though I'm sure there are remote desktop apps for OS X that would serve your purpose, VNC for example. And for Windows.

      We have VNC already to show us how much that sucks.

      Then don't use it FFS, use X11. Over Wayland. It's not rocket science to understand.

    16. Re:It's ironic... by DrXym · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And relying on a bloated 3d stack just to draw a damn window isn't a bottleneck?

      No it isn't. Modern PCs with a modern GPU will put the windows contents into a texture. Drawing a window is just a matter of telling the GPU to draw a quad with a texture. Drawing them in 3d is just means passing a model-view-projection matrix into the shader at the same time which is something that would happen anyway. 3d is literally for free. And while 3d might be a gimmick, the matrix could be used to render thumbnails, or a gnome shell view of the desktop or whatever.

      The fact is that even with X11, modern PCs are using compositors and OpenGL to do the hard work. X11 just makes it jump through extra hoops to get there, and it impedes the desktop in other ways, e.g. click on the screen with the mouse and X11 wants to hit test the coords to send it to the right window but if the window is transformed it has no idea which window it hit. So desktops have to hack around that limitation.

    17. Re:It's ironic... by Hatta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Frankly, to me, the idea, that by switching to Wayland will somehow mean that you lose network transparency it just as absurd that by switching to X you lose OpenGL support

      If you run an X program, you are guaranteed that network transparency is available. If you run an X program, you are not guaranteed that OpenGL is available. Saying that Wayland *can* support network transparency is insufficient. I should be able to *rely* on network transparency being available to arbitrary apps.

      If I find someday that a Wayland app that I need is not network transparent, what should I do? That's never even been a cromulent question with regards to X.

      So while Wayland itself will not support network transparency, the full stack surely will.

      I hope you're right. But I'm not about to shut up about it until the "full stack" exists, has all the features X11 had, and performs better.

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    18. Re:It's ironic... by Hatta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Then don't use it FFS, use X11. Over Wayland. It's not rocket science to understand.

      What do we do about native Wayland apps?

      If it's not rocket science, explain that to me. The whole point of Wayland is to deprecate X11. If Wayland is successful, it will supplant X11 and people will not write X11 apps anymore.

      So explain to me how running X11 over Wayland is a solution to the lack of network transparency in Wayland. If it's easy to understand, it must be easy to explain. So go ahead, explain it. Please! I really don't want to have to worry about this or bitch about this.

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  2. Re:Flicker-free rendering is not *possible* with X by amorsen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Get the correct DPI and fonts for the display I'm on, not the one of the remote machine?

    Forget it. Anything vaguely modern renders client-side and gets it wrong.

    X applications die with the network connection -- they cannot survive when the machine running the X server changes IP or hibernates. They are tied to one X server, so you cannot move them from your laptop to your tablet.

    It has been at least 10 years since I used X forwarding for anything except the rare GUI installer or similar short-running application. VNC is much more useful.

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