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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."

9 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 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!

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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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    6. 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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    7. 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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