GTK+ 3.8 Released With Support For Wayland

kthreadd writes "Version 3.8 of the GTK+ GUI framework has been released. A new feature in GTK+ 3.8 is support for Wayland 1.0, the display server that will replace X on free desktops. Among the other new features are improved support for theming, fixes to geometry management and improved accessibility. There is also better support for touch, as part of an ongoing effort in making GTK+ touch-aware."

Comments

Replace X?

[Great Big Bird]

"A new feature in GTK+ 3.8 is support for Wayland 1.0, the display server that will replace X on free desktops." Who said this is going to replace X on 'free desktops'? As far as I have been hearing, this is just another in a long line and because it hasn't done it yet, it is not justifiable to say it will.

Re:Replace X?

[armanox]

Agreed - it doesn't even do everything that X11 does. And some of us use those features.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this "long line" you have been hearing of?

It consists of X, then Wayland.

It won't replace X on desktops for a long while, because there are lots of backwards compatibility requirements. It will supersede X, and X will continue to be used. Like OSX has done.

Re:Replace X?

[jrumney]

The thing about free desktops is that they are free to ignore Wayland and either stick with X, or go the Ubuntu way and do their own thing.

Re:Replace X?

[Freshly Exhumed]

Poor summary. Wayland allows the running of X11 applications through an X server, with work being done to support this on Intel and AMD graphics:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2010-November/000292.html

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who said this is going to replace X on 'free desktops'?"
You mean other than the X devs?

Re:Replace X?

[Jherek Carnelian]

What is this "long line" you have been hearing of?

It consists of X, then Wayland.

Just off the top of my head:

Y Window System - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Window_System
Berlin/Fresco - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresco_(windowing_system)
Xynth - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xynth
MicroXwin - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroXwin
DirectFB - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directfb
Mir - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(display_server)

Then there is whatever Android uses -- SurfaceFlinger?

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

and wayland performs like it isnt running on anything

zing

Re:Replace X?

[armanox]

XDMCP

Re:Replace X?

[epyT-R]

Hence the compositor extension. Now you have a choice.. Party like it's 2013 or 1993. some of us like the idea of a fallback so that our gpus aren't lagged by a bunch of desktop bs while in a fullscreen application or game.

Re:Replace X?

[buchner.johannes]

Isn't Wayland aimed for the mobile market as a light-weight replacement for X? So on Desktops, where you want to support many graphics devices and features like X-Forwarding, you will want to stick with X (unless you already follow a cross-device distro using e.g. Unity).

Re:Replace X?

[JabberWokky]

To be fair, whatever Android uses -- and whatever TiVo and other embedded systems use -- are successful, and were never aimed at replacing X. They were aimed at providing graphical output strictly for their devices, and if they hit the market, did so nicely. Android's interface is used by a bunch of software these days.

The rest were all aimed at general desktop usage as a main priority, and absolutely you're right: X outlived them all. That doesn't imply that will always be the case, merely that it is much more difficult than most people think, for a wide variety of reasons.

There *does* seem to be much more momentum toward a change recently. It feels a bit like the XFree86 to XOrg leap era.

Re:Replace X?

[styrotech]

I remember having high hopes for Berlin back in the day (back when I was naively optimistic hehe).

Re:Replace X?

[0123456]

Because XFree86 / Xorg still performs like it's running on a circa 1993 dumb 1MB frame buffer. Video memory *is* actually useful for storing surfaces, rather than asking an application to redraw every time it's obscured/unobscured by anything. It's literally painful to use. Yes, literally.

I guess you never heard of X11 backing store. We were using that back in 1993.

Re:Replace X?

[ArsonSmith]

Actually Wayland is just a fix to a non-issue. There was a perceived issue quite some time ago, but that was fixed. Wayland is little more than a "Going out of Business" sign on a furniture store. There must be good deals in there!!! Wayland is not X and I've heard that this thing I use daily that works near perfectly is horrible so Wayland must be good.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of those had the support Wayland has. Almost all of the important Xorg developers are working on and supporting Wayland.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I thought Android used SDML (Simple Direct Media Layer), but I might be wrong. ...actually I think I am wrong. It seems the Skia graphics engine is used on both Android and ChromeOS (Skia wrote the engine, and was acquired by Google in 2005).

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. The advantages of Wayland are actually pretty esoteric, if the goal is "I want to draw shit to my screen fast and efficiently". People think X is some clunking mess, and yet it was playing videos on computers 20 years ago.

What X is, is old. And developers are bored with it. And they want something new and shiny and a chance to play with the hardware without abstraction throwing a wet blanket over their benchmark scores.

The benchmark of success for Wayland is that _users_ don't actually notice that anything changed. They'll fall short of that benchmark because too many people like using X11, and even the backward compatibility inevitably will cause headaches.

But developers will enjoy it more, and in the FOSS world those are the only consumers that matter.

Re:Replace X?

[evilviper]

Wayland allows the running of X11 applications through an X server

Windows 7 allows the running of X11 graphics through an X server, too!

Thanks Xming and Cygwin developers!

Re:Replace X?

[dbIII]

Y do you think so :)

Re:Replace X?

[Kjella]

Not light-weight in that respect, the main difference is it doesn't draw anything. Each application has to render its own window complete with decorations, then tell Wayland where to find it. The only thing Wayland does is to combine them, like if you have overlapping windows, transparency, transitions or 3D effects. So it should be able to handle multiple graphics devices, multiple monitors and all that locally. What it doesn't have is any forwarding, since shared buffers are inherently local and it has no knowledge of the rendering commands so it can't send a rendering stream.

Even in theory it's not so easy to know if you should render something locally or remotely, for example complex 3D application that use lots of textures and such you want to render locally, then send the finished window to the client. But say if you're a terminal server for 100 clients that want to run apps and all these are proper desktops with graphics card maybe you want to send OpenGL commands and render client side. Or maybe not again, if there are thin clients. And it probably depends on what the available bandwidth is. Personally I think web applications are far more suited to the task, if you need to access it remotely and it doesn't have a web interface then it's going to be some form of screen scraping.

Re:Replace X?

[dbIII]

The thing that pisses me and probably others off however is instead the likelyhood of wayland only apps which can't be run remotely like the X ones - then we may as well be on MS Windows.
If you have one fixed software licence for an occasionally used application in an office and it works with X you can just run it on the display of whoever wants it, but if you have the 1980s idea of a dumb local framebuffer you have to reserve a machine for that application and do hotseating. It's stepping back to the single user non-networked idea that was worn out before MSDOS was badly cloned as a cut down single user version of CP/M.
As for X bloat, it runs on Kindles FFS so that should show how stupid the bloat claim is. Would Wayland with gtk perform acceptably on something like a Kindle?

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh. I thought we were talking about serious candidates to replace X. If you look at all those things, and just see a big jumble of confusing crap that all looks the same, and appears like they're all trying to randomly replace X, then it's no wonder you're confused about the state of affairs.

The reality is that Wayland/Weston is really the first serious effort to supersede X11 in the free software arena. And that includes support from many existing Xorg developers and GPU driver developers.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well all that does is demonstrate your ignorance of the subject.

There is nothing preventing wayland to be implemented with a remote renderer, and in fact one of the goals of the protocol is to allow efficient remoting (without hampering local drawing).

Seeing as the protocol is being explicitly designed to minimise round-trips, it has potential to be significantly more efficient than remote X.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Wayland-prototype-for-rendering-software-that-runs-remotely-1715463.html

It's really pretty simple to educate yourself, which is a really good idea if you plan to rant about a subject on a public forum.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

An RDP clone is not anywhere near the same as remote X. For one thing, being "explicitly designed to minimise round-trips" does bupkiss for the performance of blasting bitmaps across the network. We can already get the same magnitude of performance improvements - and limitations - with X rendered to a local framebuffer that is then RDP'd over the network.

It's really pretty simple to educate yourself, which is a really good idea if you plan to rant about a subject on a public forum.

Right back at ya!

Re:Replace X?

[dbIII]

Dumping a framebuffer into VNC is a really crappy alternative to X, so please apologise for your insult about my "ignorance" and "educating myself".

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost all of the important ACs support some new fangled thing! News at 11.

Re:Replace X?

[serviscope_minor]

Not light-weight in that respect, the main difference is it doesn't draw anything. Each application has to render its own window complete with ***decorations***,

And it's a really fucking stupid idea (tm).

Actually it's not even a Wayland idea per-se. There is no reason -at all- that client side decorations need to be done by Wayland: it's entirely possible to get the compositor to draw them.

For some reason, however the Wayland developers policy is client decorations. It seems that they've been so blinded by their hatred for X (seriously checkout some of the FUD they've been spewing) that they're determined tothrow out all the good features as well as the bad ones.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who have been working on breaking X, you mean?

Back in XFree 4.0, we got support for DDC, aka "plug and play monitor". This is a protocol that allows the monitor to inform the computer about things like size and resolution, from which we get the DPI of the monitor, which is important to make things like fonts have the correct size on high DPI screens.

Around Xserver 1.7 (which is according to the new numbering system that was introduced after Xorg 7.0, they decided to do like XP, and just pretend all monitors are 96 DPI.

Shortly after that, Windows 7 (or Vista?) got support for reading the DPI from the monitor, like X.org used to be able to, and now we start seeing monitors in the 200 DPI area. Pretending a 200 DPI screen is 96 DPI will render everything at half size. Mostly unreadable without a magnifying glass. Meanwhile, Windows will render correctly on a 200 DPI screen, and X used to do so.

It is still possible to force the size in Xorg.conf, (after we thought we'd gotten rid of that file), and for a desktop PC that always has the same monitor, this works fine. But on a laptop, people will often have a big screen on their desk, and use the smaller screen on the go. That worked fine with DDC, back when only rich people had laptops, but when you force the size in Xorg.conf, you either need to buy a monitor with the same DPI as the laptop (try calculating the number of pixels on a 24 inch monitor at the DPI used in the Chromebook), or you'll be editing Xorg.conf every time.

Patches have been posted for reenabling DDC, even as an option, but the X.org developers refuse to merge these patches. Apparently they want to force us all to buy 96dpi monitors, or switch to Windows.

Those important X.org developers? I'm sure they'll do less damage to X by leaving for Wayland.

Re:Replace X?

[DrXym]

Wayland does not preclude a network transparent transport. Despite your aversion to framebuffers, that's exactly how most X apps draw themselves these days. They're not using X primitives, they're rendering themselves into surfaces using abstract drawing APIs like cairo.

So when you run a modern app over a network, X is just shifting chunks of bitmap around anyway. Producing something analogous for Wayland is hardly an insurmountable task, and in the meantime things like vnc exist. It's even possible that GTK / QT and other APIs could intelligently detect which backend to use, e.g. by looking at the DISPLAY variable and the app largely doesn't have to care. And if the app in question is not modern, e.g. it's an older GTK or hits X APIs directly then an X server can be run locally over Wayland to host it - but without requiring everyone else suffer the same overhead.

There is also a very good explanation on the wayland site as to why X is so awful for performance which can be summarised as too much context switching. It would be worth reading it.

Re:Replace X?

[DrXym]

X11 has extensions that shift all the damage and recomposition out to hardware, but it requires jumping through inordinate hoops which impact on performance, e.g. passing messages around between processes which increases latency from additional context switching. Basically X is a bottle neck in the middle mostly handing off tasks to extensions these days.

Re:Replace X?

[DrXym]

What X is, is a heap of arcane apis which nobody uses and a raft of extensions that have popped up over time to make it cope with the modern world. It's inefficient, complex (since clients must explicitly code for exensions with fallback behaviour). Proposing to get rid of it is not "esoteric" or "boredom", it's rational and pragmatic.

And yes I'd like my desktop to "draw shit to my screen fast and efficiently". Doing away with X11 will facilitate that. And for people who "like using X11" can continue to do so - over Wayland. Or they can spin their own dist which bans Wayland entirely and remains on X11.

Re:Replace X?

[dbIII]

I read it some time ago and think that losing flexability is a high price for the supposed benefit of as yet unproven performance increases. Wayland needs to move towards "better as shown by these numbers" instead of a handwaving "will obviously be better at some point than X because it sucks".

in the meantime things like vnc exist

It was only a very short one line post above - why didn't you read it before replying?

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

No X was designed for the LEAST USED CASE.

Unix/Linux has been burdened by a system whose design was optimised for the smallest part of the user base. As a result, it's been slow to develop and has piss poor performance.

Windows avoided all that shit... and STILL has remote access systems that perform better than X. Why? It's because most stuff that X does remotely these days (due to a modern graphical desktop) involves shoving bitmaps across the network (but in little parts)... just what the windows solution does. Wayland is a solution that offers remote desktops AND can run an embedded X server if required.

Put simply, the X zealots who claim that X has some advantages in remote desktops are deranged loons who remind my of the worst kind of audiophiles.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

You will be surprised. If that policy is, indeed, adopted, I think that Linux will fade into obscurity. There are alternatives to Linux but there are not alternatives to X11 as of now. Personally, I'll rather switch to OpenSolaris then stop using X11. GNOME 3 should have been a good lesson to every overly keen system architect. Apparently, the lessons have not been learned.

Re:Replace X?

[serviscope_minor]

What X is, is a heap of arcane apis which nobody uses

Bullshit. You ahve no idea what you're talking about.

What you *think* you're talking about is the font mechanism, which few people use any more. Oh the horror, X has a small unpopular part in the core protocol.

I guess it will take up kilobytes of space on disk while the unused code sits paged out.

Perhaps you're thinking of the drawing mechanism? Only some parts are unused. When coupled with the XRender extension it works just fine, and the two work together.

The reparenting mechanism is still used. The window manipulation mechanisms are still used. The remoting is still used. The elegant (and yes, it is elegant if you actually take the time to figure it out) copy/paste and now DnD mechanism is still used. The input basic mechanism is still used for most things. The screensaver mechanism works just fine.

And so on.

Basically most of it is just fine and for some reason people kile you get their knickers in a twist about an old protocol call which is not much used any more.

It's inefficient, complex (since clients must explicitly code for exensions with fallback behaviour).

So... your solution for requiring clients keep massive backwards compatibility is to break backwards compatibility. Okay, but you could jus tnot code clients with backwards compatibility to non extended X as well. Did that even occur to you?

Okey dokey. So it's not OK if you do it with X but it is OK if you do it with Wayland. I sense the FUD is strong in this one.

Proposing to get rid of it is not "esoteric" or "boredom", it's rational and pragmatic.

Basically the only thing people seem to coherently complain about is the little used and unloved font mechanism in X. Removing that is certainly worth losing remoting for!

And yes I'd like my desktop to "draw shit to my screen fast and efficiently". Doing away with X11 will facilitate that.

You are apparently not aware that X supports direct rendering and so has been able to "draw shit efficiently" for quite a long time now. Switching to Wayland won't change the rendering path.

The only efficiency improvement is that you input events will go from kernel->wayland->program not kernel->X->WM->X->program. If that has measurable latency then you're running on a 386 (good luck---it's out of support for Linux now) and rendering is the least of your worries.

And for people who "like using X11" can continue to do so - over Wayland.

FUD ATTACK!!! This has been rebutted many times including by me (again) elsewhere in this thread.

Re:Replace X?

[drinkypoo]

To be fair, whatever Android uses -- and whatever TiVo and other embedded systems use -- are successful, and were never aimed at replacing X. They were aimed at providing graphical output strictly for their devices

Android is Linux without X and with a new GUI. In a very real way, whatever Android uses does replace X. Prior portable Linux systems have used X, and you could do what Android is doing with X.

Re:Replace X?

[wed128]

Android is Linux without X...

And with a *completely* different userspace, and some scheduling patches (last i looked...have those been merged? will they be?)

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please apologise, hurrdurr. You seem to be under impression that X's way of doing thing is not crappy, eh? It's worse than VNC.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

> An RDP clone is not anywhere near the same as remote X.

Why not? People cry about this when it doesn't suit their usual rant, but actually it is very close to remote X.

> For one thing, being "explicitly designed to minimise round-trips" does bupkiss for the performance of blasting bitmaps across the network.

Yes it does. It significantly reduces the latency problem. Bandwidth is a far easier problem to solve, particularly for longer connections.

> We can already get the same magnitude of performance improvements - and limitations - with X rendered to a local framebuffer that is then RDP'd over the network.

The point is that it can and will work. The transfer protocol is being used is another story. It's not going to just be "blasting bitmaps", rather sending compressed deltas in a format that is not raw map of bits, but could be optimized for common desktop patterns.

> Right back at ya!

Not really. This is what you wrote:

> The thing that pisses me and probably others off however is instead the likelyhood of wayland only apps which can't be run remotely like the X ones

The likelihood of that is zero. Wayland protocol does not prohibit remoting, and there will certainly be remotable compositors. Next question.

Re:Replace X?

[wed128]

GNOME 3 does some things different then gnome 2. It's also clean and usable. I don't understand the public distaste for it...works for me! I'm sure there are others.

Re:Replace X?

[Dcnjoe60]

But doesn't Wayland run X, too?

Re:Replace X?

[Dcnjoe60]

The thing about free desktops is that they are free to ignore Wayland and either stick with X, or go the Ubuntu way and do their own thing.

Yes, free desktops are free to ignore Wayland and do their own thing. On the other hand, they are at the mercy of the distributions, such as Ubuntu, RedHat, Suse (and all the rest). Ubuntu is dropping X and not using Wayland and going with their own in house Mir, so those free desktops, if they want to run on Ubuntu will need to work with Mir. If Redhat goes with Wayland, as it appears it will be doing, then those free desktops will need to work with Wayland.

Or, they can go the Gnome route in which the developers have stated that they are going to shift from X to Wayland. Any distro that wants Gnome will need to provide Wayland.

And let's not forget the not so free video drivers. It's hard enough to get them to even support linux, but now they will need to support X, Wayland, Mir and who knows what.

My money is on whichever display server graphic cards write drivers for will be the winner. Of course, they are going to base their decision on which display server is going to see them selling more graphic cards.

But, as you say, the free desktops are free to ignore Wayland and do their own thing, even if that means their software won't run on any modern distributions anymore.

Re:Replace X?

[Dcnjoe60]

The thing that pisses me and probably others off however is instead the likelyhood of wayland only apps which can't be run remotely like the X ones - then we may as well be on MS Windows.
If you have one fixed software licence for an occasionally used application in an office and it works with X you can just run it on the display of whoever wants it, but if you have the 1980s idea of a dumb local framebuffer you have to reserve a machine for that application and do hotseating. It's stepping back to the single user non-networked idea that was worn out before MSDOS was badly cloned as a cut down single user version of CP/M.
As for X bloat, it runs on Kindles FFS so that should show how stupid the bloat claim is. Would Wayland with gtk perform acceptably on something like a Kindle?

Would your Kindle allow you to run remote X sessions? You can't say the problem with Wayland is that you can't run remote X sessions and then use the Kindle a support for X as it doesn't let you run remote X session, either.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

X is already dumping framebuffers across the network if you're using either GTK or Qt, and I suspect you are. Pretty much nothing uses the (ugly, very efficient) X primitives anymore.

Re:Replace X?

[DrXym]

Perhaps you're thinking of the drawing mechanism? Only some parts are unused. When coupled with the XRender extension it works just fine, and the two work together.

Huge swathes of X are obsolete or unused, glyphs, logical fonts, rendering primitives, codemaps, and more. The fact you mention XRender means you recognize how obsolete X11 is yet all that shit must be implemented all the same.

So... your solution for requiring clients keep massive backwards compatibility is to break backwards compatibility. Okay, but you could jus tnot code clients with backwards compatibility to non extended X as well. Did that even occur to you?

I can't even parse that. If you want backwards compatibility, install and run X11. Otherwise what do you mean? Most apps have minimal dependencies on raw X. There might be some which tap an API, or implicitly get stuck on X through GLX or similar. But most call GTK or QT. Moving to a different display server is a matter of changing some compiler and linker parameters.

The only efficiency improvement is that you input events will go from kernel->wayland->program not kernel->X->WM->X->program. If that has measurable latency then you're running on a 386 (good luck---it's out of support for Linux now) and rendering is the least of your worries.

No it isn't. The composition path would be more efficient too. There are diagrams on the wayland site which demonstrate why it is more efficient. Maybe go look at them.

FUD ATTACK!!! This has been rebutted many times including by me (again) elsewhere in this thread.

No, it's reality. You can use X11 over Wayland or go make your own distribution fork where it's pure X11 all the way through.

Re:Replace X?

[Kjella]

Actually it's not even a Wayland idea per-se. There is no reason -at all- that client side decorations need to be done by Wayland: it's entirely possible to get the compositor to draw them. For some reason, however the Wayland developers policy is client decorations.

Right now I'm browsing in Chrome on Win7, where the top window bar is full of tabs so where do the client decorations start and end? One of the main complaints I hear about CSD is that a frozen application will also freeze the windows, but you have a compositor - you can have a key combo show a pop-up menu to minimize/move the window or kill the application etc. - your options are very static if it's not responding. The other big one is consistency, but I'm not sure if you're better off just having Gtk+/Qt applications have a standard way to ask for the standard window decorations and render it themselves or have the compositor do it. Those that do something special will just ask for an undecorated window and do their own thing anyway.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, in the same sort of way that Windows and Linux can run each other through virtualization. But if you're going to all that trouble, what is the point, really? The reason for running Wayland over X is because X is ugly, old, crufty code and Wayland is supposed to be a cleaner redesign. So why stick all the old cruft of X right back on? At that point you might as well just ditch Wayland, because X already does everything Wayland will (from what I know).

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

display server graphics cards

I don't know what kind of graphics cards you put in your servers (or why), but I'll bet whichever one wins is the one that works best with the nvidia proprietary drivers, for almost the same reason as you, except that I think the driving force will be the mass of Ubuntu users who just want to play TF2 on their laptops and will switch to something else if it doesn't work out for them.

Re:Replace X?

[Hatta]

And those of us who actually use X hope that Wayland never comes close to replacing X, because it's not going to be as featureful.

Re:Replace X?

[Hatta]

There is also a very good explanation on the wayland site as to why X is so awful for performance

I don't see any benchmarks demonstrating how X is so awful for performance. The games I play perform similarly to their counterparts on Windows. Videos play smoothly. Window management is extremely responsive.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The Wayland folks haven't even demonstrated that there is a performance problem. And they expect us to abandon well loved features, for what? A flow chart that suggests there might be performance gains?

Re:Replace X?

[Hatta]

Wayland does not preclude a network transparent transport.

Wayland does not guarantee a network transparent transport. X11 does guarantee a network transparent transport. See the difference?

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would your Kindle allow you to run remote X sessions?

Yes.

Re:Replace X?

[tepples]

Patches have been posted for reenabling DDC, even as an option, but the X.org developers refuse to merge these patches.

Could you give a citation for this refusal or at least the Google keywords that will produce relevant results?

Re:Replace X?

[serviscope_minor]

Huge swathes of X are obsolete or unused

booollloooccckkkksss.....

You're talking about teeny-tiny swathes. And you ignored the bit where I pointed out the huge swathes which are still used. I love your arguing style: simply ignore the facts you don't like.

And basically you've picked almost exclusively on the font mechanism. WE know it's old.

We know it's nearly unused.

Guess what.

It doesn't matter.

I'll let you into a little secret. Modern processors (since about 1965 or s at the earliest) have this little thing I like to call virtual memory. It means that unused stuff sits on disk and doesn't get in the way. It doesn't make your programs magically slower any more than having X installed on the same system as Wayland will make Wayland magically slower.

If you were to delete that code out of the X server tomorrow it would have precisely no effect on how fast everything that doesn't use it runs.

I can't even parse that

Well, let me rephrase that: you claimed that X11 apps "have" to have alternate code paths in case the extensions are not present. Since the extensions are present on even remotely Xorg, they "have" to do that to maintain backwards compatibility.

Apparently the solution is Wayland because according to you X11 apps have to maintain backwards compatibility with ancient X but Wayland programs don't have to maintain backwards compatibility with ancient X.

That's double standards, because there's no reason X programs have to maintain backwards compatiblity with very old servers.

No it isn't. The composition path would be more efficient too. There are diagrams on the wayland site which demonstrate why it is more efficient. Maybe go look at them.

I have and it's a massive fud attack.

The only inefficiency is that some calls have to go via the compositor meaning a bunch more kernel->x->compositor->x->program transitions.

This is for things that happen a maximum of 60 times per second (once per displayed frame) for small *messages*. If your kernel can't handle that then you're running on a 386. Good luck with that.

In practive it happens far less often, more like once per input event, which are coming in at a few per second.

There's not even massive buffer copying in X over DRI.

So, basically you're talking crap.

You can use X11 over Wayland

And you can also eat a shit sandwhich too. See my rebuttal elsewhere in the thread and don't simply pretend that I havent pointed it out again.

Re:Replace X?

[dbIII]

rather sending compressed deltas in a format that is not raw map of bits,

Which now raises that latency problem again, which a system that is not bothering to do screen scraping because it knows what is there and changing is not going to have to waste time doing.

Re:Replace X?

[serviscope_minor]

where the top window bar is full of tabs so where do the client decorations start and end?

I know that feature: I installed Crom(ium) on Linux and the first thing I did was switch it off. ewww. Horrible.

Anyway, to your points: yes you can. I still think that by default it's best to have server side decorations and have the client specially request undecorated windows.

The other reason for it is that it's much easier to enforce policies on top of applications if they assert less control.

For example, some misbehaving programs like to pop up windows in funny places and raise themselves to the front when not asked. With server side decorations, I can instruct my WM to forcibly ignore those programs.

With client side decorations, how can the WM know the difference between a legitimate move initiated by the user and the application being stupid *cough* openoffice *cough*?

Fundemtally, having server side decorations puts the user more in control.

I believe that KWin on Wayland does do server side decorations.

Re:Replace X?

[DrXym]

Wow, so passionate, so longwinded, and so utterly wrong.

Re:Replace X?

[bluefoxlucid]

Ubuntu is executing Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, hoping that people will tolerate Unity and they can nuke Gnome-Shell by having it not work with Mir, thus making it inconvenient and hacky and crappy on Ubuntu. I moved to OpenSuSE to get away from this Ballmerization.

Re:Replace X?

[bluefoxlucid]

server == daemon == service. Like udev is a hardware server, it and the dbus service lets your system show the USB hard drive you just plugged in. The whole thing is an application layer waiting for client applications to give it information, because the thing drawing on your screen is one big application rather than a nightmare of 40 little applications trying to do it.

Re:Replace X?

[serviscope_minor]

so utterly wrong.

I like your rebuttal of my points. So well thought out.

no your wrong moran

Re:Replace X?

[bluefoxlucid]

They need to use Pugh Matricies and Kepner-Tregoe Decision Analysis processes to decide what to implement first and what to never implement. Instead they'll use anecdote and personal preference.

Re:Replace X?

[amRadioHed]

If you're going to include Android, then may as well include Mac OS's Quartz too. I don't think either of them really make sense to include though.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

same here. I prefer Gnome 3 to anything else on the market.

(well, maybe except for LXDE)

Re:Replace X?

[bluefoxlucid]

Proposing to get rid of it is not "esoteric" or "boredom", it's rational and pragmatic.

Prove it. Extensively.

Re:Replace X?

[bluefoxlucid]

It doesn't work exactly like Gnome 2, despite being vastly superior. Look there's less shit on my screen, I have fast access to all my running tasks in an exploded view, I have automatic virtual desktops, I can context-search for applications to run quickly... and alt-tab behavior sucks, somebody fix that.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

The backing store doesn't use video memory, and is actually slower than having the applications redraw most of the time.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, experimental: "...contain experimental support for a new X protocol extension called Composite..."

Re:Replace X?

[DrXym]

In case it wasn't clear, I wasn't prepared to wade through another longwinded, restatement of the more or less the same points which were wrong the first time around.

Re:Replace X?

[serviscope_minor]

It was clear to me that you were incapable of actually rebutting any of the points, which is what you failed to do first time round.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some being the main point.

Re:Replace X?

[armanox]

X Server, yes. Not X Client. So for the system to listen for XDMCP requests, you'd still need to have X running all the time.

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

But you are one ignorant moron, wanna know why? When you are using GTK, Qt or anything else remotely 1990 over network with X11, you are already "dumping a framebuffer (or a pixbuf to be exact) into X11 is a really crappy alternative to VNC" which at least has the decency to not send uncompressed HD and therefore huge bitmaps over limited bandwidth.

Re:Replace X?

[unixisc]

Of the free desktops, currently, only KDE and GNOME have endorsed Wayland. Qt5 and now GTK 3.8 will support Wayland, and so it will be up to DEs that use them, such as LXDE or XFCE or Razor-qt to support them or not. They can stay w/ X11 if they like - nobody is forcing them.

The people who need the remote accessing capabilities of X - mainly those who work w/ servers and who use their X terminals to access different servers remotely - those would usually be the people who need the terminals more than any of the GUI applications. So the server OSs, such as the BSDs, and even server versions of Linux, such as RHEL or Centos or Debian would do well to stay w/ them. However, the desktop versions of these OSs, such as PC-BSD, Fedora, Mageia or Mint would definitely be better off w/ Wayland - why have the compositing over the network ball and chain dragging the users who don't need it?

Re:Replace X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, idiot.

Re:Replace X?

[hobarrera]

It didn't replace X, because andoroid never used X to begin with.

Re:Replace X?

[Jherek Carnelian]

Sounds like a mis-interpretation of the situation. Although the idea of disabling DDC DPI calcs for single-monitor situations seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Here's the line from a recent release notes:

Changed behavior in handling information from DDC

The X server previously used DDC information to detect screen size and pitch, and compute DPI automatically, allowing fonts and other UI elements to automatically scale to appropriate sizes. This mechanism worked reasonably well for many single-monitor cases, but did not compute accurate DPI values for multi-monitor cases or less common single-display setups. Thus, this autodetection has been removed, and the X server no longer tries to compute an appropriate DPI value. All users wanting fonts, physical measurement units, and other UI elements scaled appropriately for their display (including users for whom autodetection previously worked) must now set DPI or some other scaling factor explicitly, either via the X server's -dpi option, a DPI setting in their graphical enironment, or an alternate scaling mechanism provided by their environment.

Re:Replace X?

[GauteL]

We can also add that it will be ages before Wayland is actually as fast as X for most things on most drivers, since it simply isn't optimised yet. So we have a hope and a promise that it will one day be faster than X.

We also have a bunch of meaningless words such as "modern" and "elegant". Words that are meaningless to the users, and only give an extremely vague hint that future versions may be better because of this modernity and elegance.

I'm not completely dismissing Wayland, but I find the idea of switching such a crucial core component based on vague future promises to be absolutely insane. I'd like to see the promises become reality first. Maybe not everything, but we need enough that the switch is worth it.

However, I am less concerned about Wayland-only apps than you. I have faith in the Qt and GTK+ developers to make the backend choice transparent to the user and app developers so that an app developed with Qt or GTK+ will automatically work with both backends. Indeed it seems you simply have to set the Environment variable GDK_BACKEND (i.e. export GDK_BACKEND=wayland) and the application will choose the backend at runtime. This way, when using an SSH tunnel, the SSH startup scripts can automatically set the GDK_BACKEND to X11 and it should display on the remote X-server.

Re:Replace X?

[karijes]

What I hate about Wayland is trolling community around it, where guys like you have no clue about the subject. First of all, there _are_ things that are preventing wayland to implement remote renderer, which showed failed GSoC project (http://www.jakemp.org/posts/2011/8/14/turns-out-its-not-as-simple-as-i-thought.html).

The second thing is how Wayland protocol _is not tested in real world_ as X, so no one, even developers knows will be more efficient than X protocol. So please, less trolling and more education.

Just in time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in time before everyone drops GTK+ for Qt!

*ducks*

You can replace my X

[RightwingNutjob]

when you pry it from my cold, dead, fingers!

Re:You can replace my X

[Anonymous Coward]

when you pry it from my cold, dead, fingers!

I agree. If Fedora switches to Wayland, I will switch to CentOS. I have a NVidia card and I don't want to use any Nouveau crap. X11 will stay on my PC. Linux might not, but X11 will.

Re:You can replace my X

[Anonymous Coward]

X ppl need to chill. The first time you see an official release of Wayland it will be running X apps via a Wayland based X server. Get a grip.

Re:You can replace my X

[Alex Belits]

The problem is not X applications in Wayland, it's Wayland applications anywhere beyond Wayland developers' desktops. We don't want them, we want all applications working in X, with all X capabilities. Hell, we wanted Windows applications in X, and Wine runs them in X better than Wayland applications that won't run anywhere but in Wayland. Wayland out-Microsofted Microsoft in breaking other people's software, and it's not even released yet.

Re:You can replace my X

[TeknoHog]

You can replace my ex when you pry me from her cold, dead fingers!

Re:You can replace my X

[wed128]

And what stops you from writing a wayland renderer for X? Wine runs GDI programs under X, why not have some Wayland API shim that does the same thing?

Re:You can replace my X

[snadrus]

X is hard, so most programs actually rely on a toolkit, like:
- GTK: Ported to Wayland
- Qt: Port in progress
- SDL: Port in progress
- EFL: Ported
- Wine: Port being considered

So you're right that nobody will write Wayland programs, but nobody writes X programs either.

Re:You can replace my X

[Alex Belits]

X is hard, so most programs actually rely on a toolkit, like:
- GTK: Ported to Wayland
- Qt: Port in progress
- SDL: Port in progress
- EFL: Ported
- Wine: Port being considered

If applications only used parts of toolkits that are independent of the underlying display system, no one would care about Wayland because then applications would simply load toolkit library that uses X or Wayland depending on what system it runs.
In reality this is not the case, so applications DO use particular display/graphics system peculiarities and therefore there is a difference.

So you're right that nobody will write Wayland programs, but nobody writes X programs either.

See above.

Re:You can replace my X

[Alex Belits]

And what stops you from writing a wayland renderer for X?

I am not a Wayland developer, don't want to join them, and absolutely definitely don't want to be an outside developer, constantly scrambling to shoehorn new code into a project that is being developed by people who don't care about it. If Wayland developers taken such task upon themselves, maintained it, and kept it in mind when doing their hare-brained redesigns, I would consider using Wayland.

Without it, it's easier for me to oppose their project loudly enough that it will sink, rather than to take upon myself such a massive development effort only to keep the functionality everyone already has in X. Your proposal is an equivalent of inviting all Linux developers to abandon Linux and work on making Cygwin better than Linux because Microsoft would prefer this to happen. We (free software developers and users) succeeding in rejecting Windows, we certainly can do it to Wayland.

Re:You can replace my X

[vurian]

"it's easier for me to oppose their project loudly enough that it will sink" You don't have that sort of power. No matter how much you shout on slashdot or wherever, you won't be able to sink Wayland through your "opposition".

Re:You can replace my X

[vurian]

"In reality this is not the case, so applications DO use particular display/graphics system peculiarities and therefore there is a difference."

In reality, this actually _is_ the case. Applications DO NOT use particular display/graphics system peculiarities.

Re:You can replace my X

[Alex Belits]

"it's easier for me to oppose their project loudly enough that it will sink"

You don't have that sort of power. No matter how much you shout on slashdot or wherever, you won't be able to sink Wayland through your "opposition".

O RLY? Wayland still exists because one (1) prominent X developer Keith Packard constantly talks about it. There is nothing else -- no good design, no one making anything that relies on it, no companies pushing it, not even distributions doing any actual work to accommodate it. It lives by hot air and dies by hot air.

Re:You can replace my X

[Alex Belits]

P. S. Just like SOAP. Remember SOAP?

Re:You can replace my X

[Alex Belits]

Go, try to run an application built for GTK over X with shared GTK library built for Wayland.

Say, Firefox.

Wayland Initial release :2008

[Osgeld]

the display server that will replace X on free desktops!

yea I know it takes some time to get stuff right, but call me when this thing gets out of duke nukem forever mode k

thanks

Re:Wayland Initial release :2008

[ArsonSmith]

It's quite the opposite of the DNF issue. DNF was promised for over a decade, then delivered a petered out version. Wayland was release as a useless version that has petered for almost a decade.

Re:Wayland Initial release :2008

[Anonymous Coward]

call me when this thing gets out of duke nukem forever mode k

OK, consider yourself called. Version 1.0.6 was released last week: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/releases.html

Re:My question

[MrEricSir]

Has there been a Gtk release where theme compatibility was the only thing that broke? That sounds amazing!

(Why yes, I do write Gtk apps for a living, how did you know?)

GTK+

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like GTK+ is thriving despite Gnome 3. Is this the case?

Re:GTK+

[innocent_white_lamb]

I haven't used gtk+ much (for my own programming, that is) but I do use glib. A lot. God's gift to C programmers: glib.

Tail wags the Dog

[tuppe666]

I have a NVidia card and I don't want to use any Nouveau crap. X11 will stay on my PC. Linux might not, but X11 will.

Except NVidia is swimming upstream with their binary drivers, and its excuses to the world are looking extremely shaky, when its competitors are open source; its bad business now Linux is the becoming the dominant OS and Google clearly favour hardware they can fix. Personally Its nice to see most Linux users moving to intel.

Re:Tail wags the Dog

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally Its nice to see most Linux users moving to intel.

Hah, like every fscking time I've run any linux distro on an box with Intel graphics, I've suffered all sorts of unexplained graphics 'weirdies' (ranging from transient blocks of random colours through to full machine lock-up) when any software has the temerity to try and hammer the supposed OpenGL support..

Ok, maybe I'm behind the times, maybe they've fixed all that crap in the past couple of years and I've not been arsed to find out, all I'll say is all my machines run with NVidia cards and binary drivers, and get on with doing their jobs without frigging problems.

Re:Tail wags the Dog

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a NVidia card and I don't want to use any Nouveau crap. X11 will stay on my PC. Linux might not, but X11 will.

Except NVidia is swimming upstream with their binary drivers, and its excuses to the world are looking extremely shaky, when its competitors are open source; its bad business now Linux is the becoming the dominant OS and Google clearly favour hardware they can fix. Personally Its nice to see most Linux users moving to intel.

Problem is that their binary drivers are of much better quality than any of the alternatives. I tried with Noveau, I really did. It was breaking down during suspend. There were inexplicable slowdowns with image rendering in my browser. And mplayrer, too. Simply, the experience with the binary drivers is much better. I don't have any problems installing NVidia drivers and I will continue using them, if not with Linux, then with something else. Linux may give up X11, but I will not. There is also OpenSolaris for Intel. I gave up GNOME when they came up with version 3, I will easily give up Linux if I cannot use X11. It's that important. An idea to force the users to move away from X11 may actually sound a death knell of Linux, just like GNOME 3 marked the sudden end of the GNOME interface. XFCE is working just as fine.

sigh

[smash]

Yet more "waaah, they're taking my X remoting!" crap. Wayland will enable an X server to run on top of it just like Windows does, just like OS X does - whilst enabling a far more efficient and modern rendering pipeline.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want X like Windows or OS X. That sucks. That also breaks forward compatibility with new applications. I want X like Unix. If Ubuntu switches to Mir and Fedora to Wayland I will switch to a Linux distribution which does not suck. Also, the claim that Wayland enables a far more efficient rendering pipeline is just bullshit. Everyhing Wayland can do could be done equalliy well within X (as they fully admit in their FAQ), which was a really well designed protocol. You know: extendable.

Re:sigh

[smash]

Being able to make X do something, and doing something without the last 20 years of brain damage are two entirely different things.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Being able to make X do something, and doing something without the last 20 years of brain damage are two entirely different things.

There is not a day where the desktop guys don't break something that used to be a reason to use linux. I don't want a fancy windows desktop replacement. There are also people who seem to be able to work (understand) the protocol (enlightenment). I'll like to keep a linux production system and it doesn't need fancy effects. It needs to work. Stop breaking stuff.

Re:sigh

[smash]

Maybe if the rendering pipeline was abstracted properly into well defined layers, shit wouldn't break when functionality was added.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all fun and games as long as the remoting works perfectly, especially in root windowless mode. TBH no one cares who it's technically achieved in the future. That's something many people misunderstood in the previous discussions about Mir and Wayland.

Having the ability to remote any application is mandature feature and lack of it will be instant blocker level issue. The support for that platform will drop significantly and for good. If remoting works out of the box by the power of some duct tape and paper clips then who cares.

The problem is that Mir and Wayland people haven't been communicating this very well. They should tell that they promise that remoting will always work out of the box, although making it technically perfect will never be a goal, and they would find a lot of more support for their project.

Re:sigh

[serviscope_minor]

Oh jeez more of the "oh but you can run X on Wayland" crap.

sure, you can eat a shit sandwich too, but it won't be very palatable.

Wayland will enable an X server to run on top of it just like Windows does, just like OS X does

Yeah, and we al know how well that works...

It's terrible. X is very much second class. Here are all the things that don't work:

* Copy/paste of more than text between X and non X
* Remoting of non X windows
* Drag and drop from X to non X
* Pleasant window management of non X windows

whilst enabling a far more efficient and modern rendering pipeline.

Evidence needed, and biased FUD from the Wayland team doesn't cut it.

X has supported direct i.e. nothing in the way rendering for ages now and that is very efficient.

Compositing window managers require a whole extra 2 socket round trips to the kernel *PER MOUSE MOVE*. Given that the kernel has a latency of positively micrseconds this is clearly a big blow for X /sarcasm.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wayland will enable an X server to run on top of it just like Windows does

And making it usefull will be as easy as getting DISPLAY=:0 OUTLOOK.EXE to work. So far, nobody has been able to do it.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Efficient rendering pipeline? As I understand it, Wayland requires a gamer graphics card to basically do anything.

X runs fine on an ET6000 or even older.

Re:sigh

[serviscope_minor]

So what's brain-damaged about X?

The font system. Not used much by modern code. Not brain damage, since it does not get in the way.

The drawing system---oh wait, once it's been augmneted with the XRender extension it still works pretty well.

The copy/paste/Xdnd system? Works great.

Window management scheme? Best in existence.

Remoting? Pretty decent and in need of some minor updates---but most programs written against it are brain damaged. Xlib is partly at fault, but Xcb solves the peoblems. Nothing fundemental wrong with the protocol there.

Etc?

So og on, what IS brain-damaged about X?

And I'm talking about X, not badly written toolkits and programs.

And I'm talking about brain-damage. $FOO needs an extension is ont brain damage, it's good design becuase X was built with that in mind---extensions are in the core protocol!

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not designed for touch based tablets.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

X on Quartz (OS X) actually works quite well. Copy/paste is not an issue.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

...second system effect.

I fully expect wayland to ruin window management at least (like Ubuntu/Unity did), so I hope there's a WaylandNest that runs under X.

Re:sigh

[Hatta]

Wayland will enable an X server to run on top of it

And what of native Wayland apps? Will remoting an arbitrary Wayland app be as easy as 'ssh -X waylandapp'? Will that work for all Wayland apps?

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

You are just talking out of your ass. From the Wayland FAQ:

"Why not extend the X Server? Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option. "

So, no there is nothing funamentally wrong in X which would prevent "abstracting out the rendering pipleine properly". There is basically some old code which is not really used anymore by modern clients (the old X drawing API). But this is small code by modern standards and needed for backwards compatibilty. I have never heard a compelling technical reason for breaking decades of compatibility.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit does not break because of X. X was always rock solid for me even with XRender. Shit breaks on the window manager side because some people think that wobbly windows are more important than stability and preserving old features. This is not a problem now, because I can just use a different window manager. Now enter Wayland ... and there is no escape anymore. Luckily, Wayland is still vapourware.

Re:sigh

[serviscope_minor]

Will that work for all Wayland apps?/em.

Theoretically you could do the following:

Run a wayland compositor. Connect an X server to the compositor.

Now write a new compositor which uses X as the back end. Then connect any wayland apps to the new compositor.

That way you get to treat Wayland programs as X programs, and will get remoting and other things, except basically dumb pixel scraping remoting. And even more layers of fun.

Easier to stick with X, really.

Re:sigh

[snadrus]

- Session-Oriented == hacks for log-in screen
- Tied to VTs
- Crashes take down all clients
- Takes 3 programs to draw a window: the application (hosting a lib), the window manager, the compositor
- Complex drivers tied to 1 version of X11
- Driver switching is impossible: it would take down all clients
- Hardware manipulation living outside the kernel (requiring root when we shouldn't)
- More lines of code than the Linux kernel
- Copy/Paste can't survive source program shutdowns (very common in Mobile)
- Remoting (& other pieces like Font) can't be fixed, but only wrapped or ignored, so we don't even know what doesn't work with X
- "Dead" code costs memory & load time
- Its model poorly fits hardware-accelerated toolkits.

Re:sigh

[Guy Harris]

X on Quartz (OS X) actually works quite well. Copy/paste is not an issue.

The person to whom you're responding said a problem was "Copy/paste of more than text between X and non X" (emphasis mine). Can you, for example, copy an image from a Quartz app and paste it into an X11 app or vice versa?

Re:sigh

[smash]

I was going to elaborate, but you already did. +1.

Re:sigh

[smash]

Wayland is not a window manager.

Re:sigh

[smash]

So essentially you're saying X is fine (for a limited definition of fine) assuming you don't use much of it and reimplment yourself?

See this for a start.

X should be just another client of an optimised, re-targetable rendering framework (e.g., OpenGL) rather than the other way around.

X itself should be totally driver agnostic, rather than providing video hardware access (that should be provided at a lower level as a kernel module)..

The status quo works, somewhat after 20 years (more?) of band-aids and associated hackery. That doesn't mean its right.

Re:sigh

[GauteL]

It's terrible. X is very much second class. Here are all the things that don't work:

* Copy/paste of more than text between X and non X
* Remoting of non X windows
* Drag and drop from X to non X
* Pleasant window management of non X windows

I share your concerns, but please allow me to moderate it slightly. X on OSX and Windows uses completely different UI toolkits between the native display server and X.

X on Wayland, on the other hand, would use GTK+/Qt on both X and Wayland. You would thus think that it would be easier for the GTK+/Qt developers to ensure the apps work transparently between the two on both display servers. It should be entirely possible to make it impossible for the user to tell whether a Window was displayed with X or Wayland.

None of this does anything to explain WHY we should switch though, other than the codebase being so "modern" and "elegant", something which doesn't matter at all to the user, and doesn't take into account all the inelegance which will be introduced when optimising Wayland and reintroducing some of the lost features.

Re:sigh

[smash]

Newsflash: 3d GPUs have been commonplace for the last decade.

Re:sigh

[smash]

Or alternatively implement a protocol that's more efficient over the network than X. Which shouldn't be hard, given that even microsoft managed it with RDP, which runs just fine over 64-128kbit of bandwidth...

Its Better Than That

[tuppe666]

It seems like GTK+ is thriving despite Gnome 3. Is this the case?

Gnome 3 is wonderful....Gnome shell on the other hand (even with extensions) is poor, with cinnamon, it is better than ever, the applications are all coming along nicely, the only one suffering the gnome scalpel is nautilus (and some of it is justified)...and well there is Nemo for that too.

Thanks Canonical

[angryfeet]

If not for the announcement of Mir, this would have taken at least 5 years

Re:Thanks Canonical

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean it would have taken another 5 years.

Re:Thanks Canonical

[Anonymous Coward]

And will be utterly useless, should Canonical really have the support of nVidia for Mir as they claim. Wayland will never be decently usable without binary blob drivers. OpenGL without those proprietary drivers just isn't there :(.

Poking interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, another useful product that's suddenly being overtaken by the need to add an interface for people who wish to poke their computer with their fingers rather than do anythign useful. Adding touch to everything seems to make it turn awful.

Re:Poking interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is going touch. If GTK+ would not embrace touch then no one would use GTK+ in a couple of years. It's all about adapting to a changing reality.

Damage done

[mongrol]

Doesn't matter. GTK dev's (and GNOME dev's) can't be trusted. I'll use QT from here on.

Re:Damage done

[Dcnjoe60]

Doesn't matter. GTK dev's (and GNOME dev's) can't be trusted. I'll use QT from here on.

Didn't QT announce support for Wayland, too?

VNC is one to one not many to one or one to many

[dbIII]

VNC? What if more than one user wants to use something on the remote machine? It's the age of the "cloud" where you can get a 64 core machine for around $9k, hook it up to fast storage and let a lot of people use it for very complex tasks. What is someone want to run things on multiple machines and doesn't want to juggle half a dozen full "desktops"? Sod this MSDOS single user non-networked approach - it's 2013 FFS!
Also that block diagram implies speed hits from the complexity and ignores that the wayland server+compositor is going to be doing a similar number of things internally as both the X server and compositor, so it doesn't prove your point and I doubt the person that drew it intended it to be used to try to prove that point.
It's been a long time and a lot of claims - why no benchmarks for identical task yet instead of handwaving and "X sux!!11!"

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[drinkypoo]

VNC? What if more than one user wants to use something on the remote machine?

They they start another Xvnc process.

What is someone want to run things on multiple machines and doesn't want to juggle half a dozen full "desktops"?

Yes, that is a real problem.

Why not build an OpenGL Backend

[Anonymous Coward]

If they don't really like X, then why not build an OpenGL GTK Backend.
It would run directly on X with direct rendering support, thus bypassing the X server
and would also run on Windows, OSX, Android, Simbian, etc.

WTF!?

[Dcnjoe60]

WTF!?

GTK+ 3.8 has added support for Wayland, it hasn't dropped support for X11. You people need to quit bashing everything GTK/Gnome.

I swear, every time I read "Wayland" I think:

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should fork a new distro called "Wayland-Youtanni"

It should have a GUI named Ripley, a poorly defined, needlessly complicated quasi-hierarchical file system manager that has a tendency to ramble as well as ignore your explanation for suspicious events, and a very powerful antivirus system that upon detecting an intrusion or infection pops up with an "Option 3: It's the only way to be sure" message.

Gtk adds support for a subset of one OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me impressed.

Ubuntu is going another way. Some distros will stick on X unless Wayland takes off. Wayland is Linux only. Every unix system will run X.

Linux folks... it's obvious you don't want to copy Unix anymore.. please just get it over with and declare that. Don't pretend to be in the fold.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, it's very simple: if there is no X11 on Linux, I'll stop using Linux. X11 is more important to me than Linux. Apparently, lessons with GNOME 3 have not been learned.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[DrXym]

VNC only restricts you to one session on windows. On Linux you can have one XVnc session per person if you liked. Or if the remote machine has X, then run a rootless X11 server over Wayland and run apps like you always have (just because your machine is Wayland doesn't mean the machine hosting the executable does). There'll probably be a vnc server running over Wayland too at some point, as well as a proper network protocol for Wayland.

Most of the objections raised about network transparency seem pretty silly IMO. Network transparent apps are a niche feature even in Linux and there are alternatives even in the short term, not to mention longer term possibilities.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[DrXym]

What is someone want to run things on multiple machines and doesn't want to juggle half a dozen full "desktops"?

I wonder for how many people this scenario would even apply though, or why it should mean the experience in a Linux desktop should be hampered by X11 just to facilitate it.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[Anonymous Coward]

Removing features because they aren't used by the average case (or because the developer doesn't want to support them) is not really acceptable. It shows that the Wayland devs are focusing only on their impression of the Desktop case.

Most users use EXT3/4 or BTRFS. Does this mean support for filesystems like JFS should be dropped?

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[drinkypoo]

I wonder for how many people this scenario would even apply though, or why it should mean the experience in a Linux desktop should be hampered by X11 just to facilitate it.

That begs the question, is the experience in a Linux desktop hampered by X11? I've so far seen no evidence that it is.

Load and unload the X cruft on demand

[tepples]

So why stick all the old cruft of X right back on?

So you can fire up the X cruft when the user starts an application that uses the X cruft, and you can shut down the X cruft when the user has closed the last application that uses the X cruft. As more GUI toolkits are ported to Wayland, fewer will require X to be running.

Re:Load and unload the X cruft on demand

[armanox]

Which for many of us, won't be. As per my example, if I want to have a server running headless and connect via XDMCP, Wayland doesn't support this. Also, plenty of us use more then Linux, and Wayland is only being developed for Linux. No Solaris or BSD support (much less older UNIX systems, say IRIX).

Re:Load and unload the X cruft on demand

[ultranova]

Which for many of us, won't be. As per my example, if I want to have a server running headless and connect via XDMCP, Wayland doesn't support this.

Who's "us"? For most home users, if they want to run desktop apps on a server, they want those apps to keep running when the desktop is shut down, so they now use Xvnc and WaylandVNC will work just as well.

Re:Load and unload the X cruft on demand

[armanox]

"Home users" clearly aren't the "us" that I was referencing. Otherwise, I wouldn't have mentioned IRIX. I'm much less concerned with "home users" then I am with the server room. When I have to tell my clients to stay away from Linux because it's too unstable, too focused on the "home users" it will be a sad day. But it's coming very quickly. // And some of those clients really wouldn't mind moving to Solaris either. Especially since stuff doesn't just randomly change for the sake of change.

Re:Load and unload the X cruft on demand

[unixisc]

You can go easy on the melodrama. X will still be available for those who want it - Wayland is an option, and suited perfectly for those who only use their own computer and don't do remote accesses to other servers. X will be there piggybacking on Wayland for applications that DO require things like your XDMCP, but it won't be needed for those who only need the Window managers.

Re:Load and unload the X cruft on demand

[dave87656]

Especially since stuff doesn't just randomly change for the sake of change

This is something which has really bothered me with Linux for a while. We are using Ubuntu for the most part and the constant changes drive me and the users nuts. Now Canonical which was going to use wayland is now going yet another direction. Sheesh.

GPGPU

[tepples]

I don't know what kind of graphics cards you put in your servers (or why)

I know why: abusing pixel shaders.

6 to 15 kbps

[tepples]

Bandwidth is a far easier problem to solve, particularly for longer connections.

Are you talking wired or wireless? And how long of a connection? In a way, the sustained bandwidth of a typical connection is limited to 6 to 15 kbps. That's the 2 to 5 GB per month cap on a mobile data connection, times 8000000 kilobits per GB, divided by 2629746 seconds in an average month.

Re:6 to 15 kbps

[AvitarX]

It's easier to upgrade my plan than it is to improve the latency of a cell network.

Re:6 to 15 kbps

[tepples]

It's easier to upgrade my plan

But it can be cost prohibitive to upgrade the plans of all users of your application.

Re:6 to 15 kbps

[Anonymous Coward]

Any connection really.

You have a bandwidth limited connection? That's nice. Pay some more money, and get more bandwidth.

You have a latency limited connection? You're probably shit out of luck.

Note, that I did not say it makes the bandwidth problem worse than X, necessarily. Just that the fewer the round-trips, the less latency dependent it becomes.

Comparing relative bandwidth use of each, you would have to look at a *real* remote compositing wayland server with a decently optimized transfer protocol. Scraping raw, uncompressed, bitmaps, is obviously not what it is going to do.

http://lists.apple.com/archives/x11-users/2003/May/msg00248.html

"I've tried both (except I use Citrix instead of VNC). Citrix is MUCH faster
than X-Windows probably because of the X client/server communication being
done locally instead of long distance. I believe the problem is the latency,
not the bandwidth."

A presentation showing X forwarding is pretty slow, and VNC keeps up with FreeNX.

http://vis.lbl.gov/Presentations/2008/AcceleratingRemoteDisplayPerformanceForGUIBasedApplications.pdf

Re:6 to 15 kbps

[AvitarX]

Then make a curses interface, and keep bandwidth low.

Now where's the Win32 port?

[Nimey]

How many more years to we have to wait for a Win32 port of GTK+3? There are several projects which only have old versions ported to Windows because their newer builds target GTK+3 and that's not available yet.

Re:Now where's the Win32 port?

[Anonymous Coward]

it will happens as soon as ubuntu announces a gtk concurrent on win32

Re:Now where's the Win32 port?

[Anonymous Coward]

> How many more years to we have to wait for a Win32 port of GTK+3?

Why did they reject your patches?

Re:Now where's the Win32 port?

[Nimey]

Kill yourself.

sudo apt-get install such a transport

[tepples]

Wayland does not guarantee a network transparent transport.

However, users' demands will guarantee that distributions make such a transport available through a command analogous to sudo apt-get install wayland-network-transparent-transport.

Re:sudo apt-get install such a transport

[Hatta]

As long it's installed by default, everywhere, and usable without elevated permissions, and as easily invoked as 'ssh -X remoteapp', I'll be happy. But given how the Wayland developers have taken the issue, I'm not holding my breath.

Re:sudo apt-get install such a transport

[Alex Belits]

It does not matter where it is installed if it can't be implemented in any sane way. The way Wayland developers act, it's clear that any remote access will have to be stuffed into applications or bolted on top of framebuffer, and no effort will be made by Wayland developers to keep it working from release to release. This leaves VNC-like kludges as the only viable implementation, what is vastly inferior to X and does not support remote 3D or video.

X server for Android

[tepples]

Would your Kindle allow you to run remote X sessions?

That depends on whether or not Amazon left a feature essential to the X server for Android out of the Kindle Fire. Did it?

Re:X server for Android

[dbIII]

I meant the e-ink versions that run X and the "awesome" window manager (http://awesome.naquadah.org/) - pity the Kindle platform is so closed that it had to be reverse engineered before anyone could use it to put remote windows on.
Such a lean X window manager also demonstrates a likely design flaw with wayland being stuck with the window management that is built in and no option to replace it with different window managers for different roles. Making a one size fits all system that can be tweaked to fit different circumstances would be a challenge and it's not clear whether the Wayland developers have even considered that.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[dbIII]

I wonder for how many people this scenario would even apply though

About 50 people where I work for a start. Different servers do different tasks so application windows are vastly better than a stack of slow VNC desktops and even large images are best dealt with on a node with 32GB instead of a desktop with 4GB.

hampered by X11

In what way exactly? Wayland hasn't progressed to a working demo state yet so how is X hampering people more than what is available?

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[dbIII]

So that is somehow supposed to be better than the seamless high performance behaviour of application windows as distinct from a stack of slow scraped bitmaps?

Most of the objections raised about network transparency seem pretty silly IMO. Network transparent apps are a niche feature even in Linux

It appears we've hit the problem of the person who is dismissing X out of hand does not actually understand why people use it, which I suppose it why your suggestions have failed to address the questions.
Until Wayland can match the features and performance of X on a Pentium100 in 1999 or X on a Kindle today I'm going to call out all these "X sux" idiots that go on about performance problems. Benchmarks say a lot more than "just do something incredibly inconvenient and Wayland does the job", so how about some benchmarks from tests instead?

That modular behaviour that you are pretending is a flaw is probably why we are still using X after all these years - like grandpa's axe we've put a better handle on and changed to a better head three times but we still call it grandpa's axe. At least one positive thing along those line with wayland is it can use more than just it's own toolkit even if the window manager etc is all built in.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[DrXym]

Well if the inclusion of JFS meant that the experience for the majority using EXT3/4 or BTRS was degraded then yes. But it isn't, so it doesn't matter. But for the majority of people using a local desktop, they are suffering a degraded experience for the sake of a fairly esoteric workflow (one which can be accomplished anyway even if the desktop did move to Wayland).

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[DrXym]

X11 involves a large number of context switches thanks to all the processes working to update the display. The intent of Wayland is to reduce that complexity and context switches which means the desktop will be more responsive and lightweight. I'm quite willing to accept that it will take some time for Wayland to mature sufficiently to reach optimal performance and stability, but that aside, it's obviously a smart idea to pursue. Many prominent X devs think so do, such as Keith Packard.

mmm define

[houbou]

Criminal... got a feeling that they will search for keywords and pass it along various sub agencies or group, each responsible to figure out if it's a lead within their roles.

Run the app locally

[tepples]

You have a bandwidth limited connection? That's nice. Pay some more money, and get more bandwidth.

But there is a limit to how much more money for bandwidth the user of an application will be willing to tolerate. Good luck affording enough bandwidth to run something like OnLive for 8 hours a day, 22 days a month.

Just that the fewer the round-trips, the less latency dependent it becomes.

And if the application is running locally in a sandbox, communicating with the other machine only to synchronize data, there are even fewer round-trips. One example is any web application written in JavaScript.

Re:Run the app locally

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a limit to how much more money for latency the user of an application wil be willing to tolerate. And on a consumer cellphone network, that limit will come a lot sooner than ability to upgrade bandwidth.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[DrXym]

It appears we've hit the problem of the person who is dismissing X out of hand does not actually understand why people use it, which I suppose it why your suggestions have failed to address the questions.

I'm not dismissing X out of hand. That would be a straw man. What I am saying is that it clearly impacts on the local desktop performance (and it's not hard to find comments by leading X devs who state this for a fact). And most of the objections raised for switching to something more efficient concern a feature that not many people use, and even if Wayland were to become the default experience, could be achieved anyway.

Anyone who absolutely cannot abide the change can just use an X11 fork, or vnc / MX / X over Wayland or scratch the itch and implement in Wayland what they perceive to be missing.

Smoothness

[jones_supa]

Do you think that Wayland or Mir could add speed and smoothness to the Linux 3D-accelerated desktop? Because that's the feature I'm anticipating the most. When you turn on a little bit of effects there's always that slight jerky feeling you start getting. And it eats the performance too much. There's little delays in things happening, or some animation might pause for a little while. The icing of the cake, the fine responsivity of Win/Mac is currently not there with Linux.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[Anonymous Coward]

With the rate at which hardware is advancing, the context switches aren't a big deal. X ran fine on my 1990s hardware. It ran fine on my Nokia N900 running at ~600MHz. It runs fine on 2013 hardware.

Not to mention that a Wayland desktop is not free of context switching... You just get rid of the WM as a separate process. You still context switch between server and applications.

Xcb Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm rather more curious about when GTK+ will support running directly on top of libXcb, not merely libX11. Wayland may or may not take over the Unix world, but Xcb does actually look poised to take over from X11. Of note, if you're running with Debian or Ubuntu, your system is using Xcb's emulation of X11 behind the scenes.

Wayland and Unix

[unixisc]

Looks like the FreeBSD project is now working on adding Wayland support. I wouldn't be surprised if NetBSD too gets it. As for Solaris, has Oracle really been adding much to it of late?

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[dbIII]

I see points two and three in that link as listing shortcomings in current Wayland design - then look at the questions raised in the comments "I am dreading the applications taking control of their window decorations" for one - the sort of thing that has made the MS Windows desktop very confusing at times with apps that have their own subwindows.
The ironic thing is all the hate poured on X even though that's where the Wayland direct rendering was taken from.
So sorry to be someone in a "pretty silly" niche that Wayland developers disparage as irrelevant - but the only reason I have a job working with linux, solaris and freebsd is because X allows users to do the many to one situation of having many applications from many nodes open on their desktops at once without a painfully time wasting VNC experience. Once apps come out as Wayland only it's a trip back to the MSDOS mentality - fine for gaming consoles or phones but not much good in other situations.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[dbIII]

So instead of giving an answer you'll namedrop someone that gave the idea and not the implementation faint praise?

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[DrXym]

You'll have to tell me what points 2 & 3 are since they're not numbered.

But addressing window decorations, that confused me too for a while. As far as I can tell, Wayland does not see it as its job to adorn a surface with decorations. So the simplest solution is the client does it and I expect a library or theme engine of some sort will appear which will take care of it and ensure a consistent appearance over the desktop. But client side decoration isn't the only option - KDE is talking of server side decoration implemented inside the window manager that underpins their desktop.

It's not like you can't override the frames in X even if you have to do tricks - look at Google Chrome for example. Or Steam. Or Wine apps running on X. I assume they all disable server frame and paint their pseudo decorations and frame in its client area. While this looks a bit odd, it also brings advantages too. For example Chrome wastes far less space in GNOME 3 than Firefox is because it condenses 3 horizontal strips of buttons, menus and title bar into a single strip. Sometimes an app does need to be in control of it's appearance.

And to reiterate my point, remote desktops and apps don't go away even on Wayland. There is even an XWayland which I expect that dists will ship and run with for a good while since some apps may be more gnarly to port than others (e.g. what does Firefox do about plugins). Just do what you did before or avail of the other options, or scratch the itch, or fork. I don't see the issue at all. It doesn't mean the entire desktop needs to be hampered by a 30 year old architecture with numerous recognised bottlenecks.

I have been boycotting GTK since gnome3

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome3 was the worst abomination to ever happen to GUI's I never want anything to do with the gnome foundation again (GTK is owned by gnome). They are untrustworthy and not dependable. Can't trust them not to fuck up GTK too.

Page file locality

[tepples]

I guess it will take up kilobytes of space on disk while the unused code sits paged out.

Is all the unused code guaranteed to be in the same page as other unused code, rather than being in the same page as used code? Because if one piece of code in a given page is used, the whole page has to be loaded into RAM.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[dbIII]

You somehow have managed to miss my entire point of wayland only apps being stuck on scraped screens at best, and have also not managed to show that a monolithic approach with internal communication is necessarily going to outperform a modular approach - you have instead been stating that it is faster with no benchmarks or other evidence to back it up.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[DrXym]

No, assuming there were a remote transport, it wouldn't be "scraping" anything since every window would be a distinct surface which could be sent as deltas and recomposed at the other end. There are numerous ways to achieve this and it's hardly different from X at the moment - most modern apps are either just shifting whole pixmaps around or complex xrender lists with bidirectional communication. And it doesn't stop vnc style servers, or X, or MX or anything else.

Second, a "monolithic" approach has obvious advantages since there aren't 3 separate processes sending messages between themselves, maintaining duplicate state and incuring context switches. Does that mean it translates into an efficient implementation? Time will tell. As for benchmarks, are you even serious? Wayland is still in development. It won't be possible to to compare like for like for some time. It does not mean that makes a valid excuse for not moving. Even seasoned X developers want the move and recognise the need for it.

It's not like X11 is going away any time soon. It will sit on top of Wayland at least until the apps which constitute the desktop are ported.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[dbIII]

As for benchmarks, are you even serious?

Since you and others are talking about how wonderful wayland is in the present tense instead of the future sense of course I'm serious - it's a polite way of saying either put up or stop being dishonest.

Re:VNC is one to one not many to one or one to man

[DrXym]

No, dishonest is where someone pretends that someone else talked about wayland in the present tense in order to justify some ludicrous demand for benchmarks. Stop being ridiculous.