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Wayland/Weston Gets Forked As Northfield/Norwood
An anonymous reader writes "Weeks after Canonical announced Mir, Wayland's display server protocol and Weston compositor have been forked. A contributor to Wayland found differing views with the project over desktop eye candy and other technical decisions to the X11 successor, which resulted in forming the Northfield and Norwood projects. The developer, Scott Moreau, has been outted from the project but has provided a lengthy explanation why the fork was needed to advance the Linux desktop."
... yet another flavor of Linux that is going to take the desktop by storm.
I expect it will still be used quite a bit for decades to come.
Meh, bought a MAC, FCK IT too much drama...
It's about time the entire desktop go 3d. It's 2013 and video cards can do it easily. Instead of windows why not just use rotating cubes?
You said "forked"!!!! Why does this sight have to be so offensively sexist?
We need Valerie Aurora and Adia Richards to come to the rescue!
I'd never do it myself, but I'm looking forward to seeing which projects survive and how they change the landscape in five years. X11 was difficult to use for years... let's see what a little competition can do for innovation and usability.
Agile Artisans
If you want to troll you need to be less obvious.
I give it a 1/10 for trying.
I think this is hilarious. Heh heh. Hopefully people will realise that X11 is really the best, and that if we are to advance desktop linux, what we really need is X12 or something, rather than some stupid reinvention of the wheel.
X11 FOREVER!!! !!! !!!
What is Canonical doing? I am still not 100% convinced we need to replace X, and that Wayland is the best form for that replacement. After doing this, will they still be compatible with the majority of Linux distros?
I wouldn't be surprised if they replace the kernel next because the entire thing wasn't written in the past 2 years. It's not cutting edge, right? *rolls eyes*
Everybody involved with the wayland project is happy to see weston (the reference display server) get forked to be developed into a more usable desktop environment. That's basically what it's for, and this is far from the first (ubuntu forked it, ADWC was another fork).
This entire article argued he couldn't do what he needs with a plugin alone, which is not relevant to his problem with the wayland community. The problem was his refusal to use the existing mechanism to retain protocol compatibility by copying the existing protocol code into a new extension and modifying in there: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-March/008172.html
In four pages, he didn't address why he didn't feel like doing that.
ghod, plz DNT mk X11 go all TIMECUBE on us!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Sounds like a merged sequel for Brokeback Mountain and The Matrix!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
That's an excellent question.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Standards
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"Advance." You keep saying that. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What is needed, before "advancing" anything, is to advance acceptance of the Linux desktop, and IMHO this ain't helping.
It's about time the entire desktop go 3d. It's 2013 and video cards can do it easily. Instead of windows why not just use rotating cubes?
You can easily do that without some fancy display driver or even 3d glasses. Just strap together 6 monitors into a cube shape and fashion a suitable base that will let it rotate in 3 axes (probably best to put the CPU inside the cube so you only need to provide power to the cube). Then to change desktops just flip the cube in the appropriate direction.
There's much similarities between these OS projects for linux and the 500 year old protestant movement when it comes to unity.
While the emerging display servers fight it out, I think I'll just stick to the tried and true X11.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Once Wayland components developers started trying to implement something practical, they discover, one by one, that they need those "unnecessary" X features after all, however there is no way to explain it to the rest of developers, who still believe that removing everything they don't immediately use in their narrow area is a great design practice.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I know this is a troll, but KDE has had that functionality for years. Both in mouse-rotatable cube with windows that 'pop out' and have depth, and it's even head-tracker compatible for maximum nausea!
Capcha: Southpaw (which I am)
Who came up with these names anyways...
I hear that Woburn/Billerica is the next fork of Wayland/Weston, while Wellesley/Southboro is the next fork of Northfield/Norwood. Coming on the heals of Woburn/Billerica is the Provincetown/Gloucester fork. And they're really planning a breakout with a Providence/Cranston fork....
Keep on forkin', never finish anything, and fragment the fuck out of everything. Make sure to give the enduser the conundrum of choice. The year of the linux desktop should be just around the corner.
This is what people did when Sun's NeWS, Display Postscript, Berlin/Fresco, and Y Window System were released. You are in good company..
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Yet another fork of display technology projects for FOSS?
Are they trying to solve the problem by parallelizing the problem: break it into lots of little pieces and work simultaneously on them to arrive at a solution sooner?
Or is this a case of egos, where "those guys don't know anything I'll start anew and do it right"?
What matters is delivered stable technology. It doesn't have to be perfect or massively extendable: just stable, performant and delivered.
+1
We have redundant efforts with databases.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3590191&cid=43301755
Redundant efforts with web browsers and phones.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3420641&cid=42739283
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3457941&cid=42884767
Then waste heat on anachronistic projects.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3469697&cid=42931869
And now we have redundant efforts on display servers.
Doesn't anyone else the damn pattern here? As long as this nonsense continues, open source platforms are going to be inconsistent, slapped-together, lack-luster trash heaps without any clear focus or direction. All the while playing catch up to where desktops were over a decade ago, in an age where the desktop is rapidly diminishing into irrelevance.
Sigh.
Have fun with your fork, guys.
I read some of the mailing list threads about it and saw no abuse, from either side. It all seemed very civil and focused on technical matters.
If Phoronix is right that he's been kicked from the Wayland mailing list and IRC then something else must have happened. Got any links?
I hope Wayland isn't one of those projects overrrun by back-patting fanbois who ganged up on him and voted him to be blocked simply for having a different view.
X never bothered with that since it's got nothing whatsoever todo
with a display server.
These guys, whether Woeland, Murk, or Backwood, have got their ego's
where their heads uses to be, and the latter,... - well you know where.
ROTFL.
Sent from my X11 display server.
Shouldn't someone create a couple more forks with names like Eastcoast and Southwood so we can have all the cardinal directions covered? Then we can have programmer gang wars.
Of course it's tried and true, that's why X11 is the current standard graphics system for the free/open source community.
But the topic here isn't the current system, it's about the next one. X11 works very well and is mostly stable, but it's also extremely crufty, hard to maintain, low on performance and features, and the code is just plain gag-worthy.
A next generation replacement for X11 is long overdue, with backwards compatibility so that all those X11 clients continue to work, locally at least. The project should really have started 10-15 years ago, but better late than never.
Wayland is Linux specific because...
One of the things that went wrong with X was that we tried to pull too much of the OS into X so that we could run on every old platform out there. Or to put it more bluntly, bending over backwards for fringe platforms
He seems to forget that Linux was once a "fringe platform". Sigh.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/interview/kristian-hogsberg
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
How noble and wise of you... especially you taking the time to tell us all the fucking obvious.
If it's good enough for EFL, GTK and KDE it's good enough for everyone.
Especially Enlightenment... It literally does EVERYTHING. I could understand Gnome and KDE... But what could you possibly change that the EFL guys didn't feel worth changing ?
What worries me is this farce following the Ubuntu\Unity\Mir debacle... This trend to abandon or fork projects in late development even before hitting stable is not normal. Just how many people are working on Wayland ? Two dozens ? Three ? And how many are writing code for it ? A few dozen more... There's just not enough to go around...
Now that it is 2013, we now know that most of the GNU/Linux software will use GTK+, Qt, and some use EFL and FLTK. Make something that supports that supports only those 4 toolkits. This is GNU/Linux, not Windows. GNU/Linux is not permanently wedded to any one display protocol.
Can Wayland:
1. allow ssh -X?
2. write to any window (assuming permissions are okay) needing only a display and a Window id?
I guess what I'm really asking is what's wrong with X?
The victor would emerge stronger than either, and free from doubt.
There comes a point where there is no readily identifiable "best" strategy. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in either direction. Perhaps one persons says, "the rule of thumb that holds for the common case, doesn't apply here." Perhaps there are valid differences about what goal to optimize for -- it is a law of the universe that you can't optimize in all directions at once.
At some point the only way to decide the issue one way is to fork the code and see what becomes popular. As an outsider, you don't really have a good perspective on whether this is justifiable. Clearly the magic code factory has stopped for the moment, but coding efforts are probably stalled more often than not. I started on a new project a few weeks ago, and I don't expect to be doing anything but refactoring and bug fixes for several weeks to come. And if I decided that it was just as much trouble to start over with a bare set of classes and do things the way I think they should have been done the first time, are you going to call me out on it? Is there any better proof of the viability of that strategy but in the execution? Perhaps this will be a better performing or more feature-ful product, and perhaps not, but if the only thing learned from the experience is that "doing it this way turned out to be a bad idea," that still counts as a win in my book.
A failure is something you don't learn anything from.
Lastly, as counterproductive as a fork may be, it's nowhere near as hard to merge changes as it would be if the guy had just started a whole new project. Which is the biggest reason to cry foul over Canonical's development efforts.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Most of the hostility is coming from people outside of linux - eg. RMS. If he had been in charge of linux there would be no binary blobs allowed (part of at least a draft of GPL3 was designed to stop such things), but he has not contributed code to the Linux kernel because that's not one of his projects.
Are you serious? Binary Blobs are an unpleasant compromise, and Nvidia is the last (okay, there are binary blobs all over the place). In retrospect has that compromise helped or hindered Linux adoption....that I think is hard to call, but it has slowed the development of open source drivers, its also delayed the release of OS updates; been an insecure part of kernel with security vulnerabilities lasting years (unheard of in the rest of the kernel); had unfixable bugs; delayed more progressive technologies by not integrating nicely.
In 2008, 176 Linux kernel developers signed a Position Statement on Linux Kernel Modules that stated "We, the undersigned Linux kernel developers, consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable... We have repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem."
Nobody cares what retarded, wrong shit you keep posting about for years, you nitwit.
I think the desktop on Linux is truly approaching it's demise.
Actually I think the desktop's only future is on Linux.
Most of the regular users are moving on to tablets and phones. Even in businesses I'm starting to see people migrate to just a tablet. There's still plenty of desktop users but at the rate we're going desktop computers will be a thing of the past within the decade.
I'd wager that geeks and Linux types will be the only ones who still want a desktop OS and system by 2020. We'll probably be running on off the wall hobbyist hardware (Raspberry Pi type devices) and hooking up to mostly HD televisions as monitors if purpose built monitors aren't still available.
I'm not complaining - I'll be keeping mine too as even as a technophile I still prefer to sit down to a full system rather than use a tablet, but I truly think that there will eventually be a "year of Linux on the desktop" - it'll just be after most of the world has forgotten about the desktop.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Then explain why old C standards (including in glibc), old hardware (in the linux kernel) and old graphics drivers (including 3d!) in X are all being dropped as 'unmaintainable'. If backwards compatibility is so important, then pre-ansi K&R c conventions would still be supported in gcc/glibc (which they're not, having had the related headers removed pre 2.10 I believe), dri1 would still be supported in X (thus allowing 3dfx, rage128, rage64, via-unichrome, savage, etc 3d acceleration, 8 bit pseudocolor would not generate only greyscales (only on ATI, or on everything? And AFAIK even in 'TrueColor' 8 bit mode), and the linux kernel would not be dropping i386 support because it interferes with new multiprocessor locking techniques (because obviously it makes so much sense to have that all in x86 rather than in sub-projects for 386/486/586 and 686+, possibly with a jump table if you want the same kernel to boot off any of the aforementioned procs. Not like it'd boot on even a 486 given the initrd file sizes nowadays....)
Point being anybody who says that hasn't paid attention to both developer laziness as well as 'modern hardware' snobs who think that erasing the past will keep other's from realizing just how shitty the newer code they're developing is in comparison.
X11 isn't so bad. The current server is messy and some code and parts of the protocol should be deprecated. But these projects are all trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and that's why they are all likely doomed to fail..
I think you mean ousted.
Go ahead and make all the forks you want.
But here's what I'd like to see:
-The ability to always be able to switch away from an errant application. That imples ...
-Not allowing apps to hog all input without an exit key (Alt+Tab or whatever).
-Keep a kill switch (XKill).
-The ability to restart the X (or whatever) system without killing all apps. Why can't the apps keep running and allow you to restart the graphics system (if required)?
-That implies keeping (or allowing) Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart the graphics system.
-Easy and fast network desktop access, if desired. This isn't just for people working at National Laboratories, but also just for accessing Grandma's computer and so forth.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Forking the implementiation (Weston): cool. Like forking a browser. Existing web pages should continue to work, and maybe you'll expose/fix some bugs.
Forking the API (Wayland): NOT COOL. That is like forking HTML. Everyone has to rewrite their web pages now.
Or tablets and phones will take on more and more desktop-like features.
When I envisage the future, its having my phone scale up to run something like my current desktop now when connected to bigger monitors/keyboard/mouse. This is not "phone interface on the desktop" as its being interpreted by MS with Metro (and other notable offenders) - it's a device presenting the appropriate UI for the appropriate context. Not mashing one idea until it vaguely suits another.
X11 isn't so bad. The current server is messy and some code and parts of the protocol should be deprecated. But these projects are all trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and that's why they are all likely doomed to fail..
X11 is very messy in places. There's some critical issues in there that need to be fixed soon (notably the use of 16 bit values in the protocol level for window sizes and locations). The ICCCM has a lot of wreckage of earlier protocols in it that are just totally in need of being scrapped. Taking a broom to X11 to give it a thorough clean (with selected bits of incompatibility) would be a tremendous thing.
But the compositing stuff that has the Wayland people worked up? Totally not an issue to me as a GUI toolkit maintainer. Nor is it an issue to any of the application authors or users I know.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
not for want of geek-creds, but my N900 is running a full-on desktop. Perchance you are confusing hard with soft?
Customisability and universally interchangeable parts are what keeps the desktop alive. Until phone hardware becomes open, decent businesses will avoid tablets like the plague.
There is always going to be a need to pack as much power as possible into a workstation for CAD, 3d graphics and other specialty applications. This means a form-factor that can dissipate more heat then a tablet can.
On the flip side, on the very low end, administrators are going to want machines that are essentially tied down to the desk for places like call centers or data processing. For one the mouse/monitor/keyboard paradigm works very well here, but also workstations are much less 'personal'.
The point being, that while there be some interesting things that tablets and touch screens bring to the party that disrupt the mouse/monitor paradigm, the computer workstation and some variation on it's components will still be here for decades.
Forking the adjacent municipalities of Wayland and Weston by merger or rearrangement is a possibility. The fork feasibility is improved if it happens on April 18th, is made of silver, and is done by Paul Revere.
The Wayland People's Front will never stand for this! The People's Front of Wayland are just wannabes. Not to mention the Campaign for a Free Wayland.
Love,
Loretta (formerly Stan).
That's a good point. Though Apple remains strongly committed to OSX for now. Their userbase is likely to stick with desktops since they tend to be power users types. I think 2020 is a bit soon for your vision, more like 2040.
But.... Microsoft has been trying to push up the hardware requirements of Windows. If they continue in this vein and get more aggressive they are going to open up a large windows at the low end of the market, for traditional high power desktops that run on in expensive hardware. Where your $300 systems could be either: a traditional Linux notebook or a tablet (most often also running Linux).
Display Postscript became Display PDF which is now called Aqua on OSX. Given that has about 10x the user base of X11, perhaps not the example you were looking for.