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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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]

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?

[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.

You can replace my X

[RightwingNutjob]

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

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

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

[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

[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.

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!"