Wayland/Weston Gets Forked As Northfield/Norwood

Just what we need... by QuietLagoon · 2013-03-29 07:55 · Score: 2, Funny

... yet another flavor of Linux that is going to take the desktop by storm.

Re:Just what we need... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 07:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

Yeah, a diverse marketplace of ideas is never beneficial.
Re:Just what we need... by sheehaje · 2013-03-29 08:05 · Score: 2

Umm, how is a display server and compositing window manager a flavor of Linux?
Re:Just what we need... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 08:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'd rather take one solid piece of software than 10 which are broken in different ways.
Re:Just what we need... by marcello_dl · 2013-03-29 08:36 · Score: 3, Interesting

It's interesting how many people are interested in the desktop.
I just care about MY desktop instead. I prefer to edit some configs (which clearly is rocket science) and experiencing some inconsistent look and feel among applications, than using MS or Apple solutions and submit to whatever their management think is a good idea to stick on MY desktop to make their system more difficult to migrate from.
People want to replace xorg (a fork itself)? best wishes, not a problem for me. Problems would arise when xorg replacements are used to introduce incompatibilities, push one distro ahead of the others, render old software/hardware obsolete. It's not easy to pull such stunts by staying free as in GPL, though.

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Re:Just what we need... by lgw · 2013-03-29 08:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

If an ordinary application can't be written once to look fine on both, then really it is a new flavor. If the application writer doesn't have to know or care, then it's not.
This fork happened over the difficulty in adding candy to the UI, so in theory all the apps that aren't the shell shouldn't care, but in practice, well, time will tell.

--
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Re:Just what we need... by MessageApprovalMan · 2013-03-29 09:17 · Score: 1

The point is, it's another attempt to use a GUI to make Linux palatable enough on the desktop for _ANY_ distro to be successful.
Hasn't happened yet, but Ubuntu was close until they fucked it up. My current money is on Mint.

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Re:Just what we need... by unixisc · 2013-03-29 09:18 · Score: 1

No shit!!! Wayland has barely hit version 1.0 and is not fully functional in most environments, and already it has a fork. That too, w/ only 1 guy!
Re:Just what we need... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 09:44 · Score: 5, Funny

I'd rather take one solid piece of software than 10 which are broken in different ways.
I believe this distribution is what you're looking for.
Re:Just what we need... by lister+king+of+smeg · 2013-03-29 09:53 · Score: 4, Funny

I'd rather take one solid piece of software than 10 which are broken in different ways.
I believe this distribution is what you're looking for.
he said solid not unstable or unusable

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---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Re:Just what we need... by sidragon.net · 2013-03-29 10:14 · Score: 1, Interesting

Absolutely freaking correct. The state of open source duplicity is simply embarrassing these days.
Re:Just what we need... by BarfooTheSecond · 2013-03-29 10:33 · Score: 1

Stronger... and unused.
Re:Just what we need... by buchner.johannes · 2013-03-29 11:01 · Score: 1

It's interesting how many people are interested in the desktop.
I just care about MY desktop instead. I prefer to edit some configs (which clearly is rocket science) and experiencing some inconsistent look and feel among applications, than using MS or Apple solutions and submit to whatever their management think is a good idea to stick on MY desktop to make their system more difficult to migrate from.
Using open source desktops you are also at the mercy of upstream. Forking a desktop and maintaining updates is just too time-consuming for an individual. If upstream abandons your favorite desktop (e.g. old versions of GNOME1 and KDE3), you are pretty much screwed, because your system will become outdated and incompatible with everyone else who is moving on.

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Re:Just what we need... by jedidiah · 2013-03-29 11:29 · Score: 3, Interesting

...yet oddly enough I am still using GNOME2 despite everyone's best attempts to kill it.
A fork needs to be popular to be relevant. Otherwise it is just noise. The same is true of distributions. Few people are aware of them all or even how many there are. Most are highly specialized or have no following to speak of.
So effectively the level of diversity you have to consider yourself is far less than what some Usenet troll might want you to think.
The same is true of display servers. These projects have to gain momentum, developers, and users. Mass revolts may undermine that.
Then there's infighting of course...
I have to confess. I am feeling a big mountain of shadenfreude right now...

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Just what we need... by hawkinspeter · 2013-03-29 13:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

If he's right, then maybe his fork will gain momentum. If he's wrong, then he'll be wasting some of his time, but I bet he'll learn from the experience either way.

Often it takes someone to branch out and start something to jumpstart development so that other people see what's been done and think it's worth contributing to. Unless someone makes that jump, we'd never know what might have been.

--
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Re:Just what we need... by MessageApprovalMan · 2013-03-29 16:35 · Score: 1

Okay, did that. What next?

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Re:Just what we need... by flimflammer · 2013-03-29 20:54 · Score: 4, Funny

In fact, find a dr. Sues book
What is that, a book on the benefits of malpractice insurance?
Re:Just what we need... by Eunuchswear · 2013-03-29 21:03 · Score: 1

Absolutely freaking correct. The state of open source duplicity is simply embarrassing these days.
I don't think you know what word means.

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Watch this Heartland Institute video
Re:Just what we need... by Hal_Porter · 2013-03-29 21:31 · Score: 1

Getting rid of the counter-revolutionary fascist insects in the Judea People's Front and the Popular Front of Judea made the People's Front of Judea so much stronger.

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Re:Just what we need... by burdickjp · 2013-03-30 01:23 · Score: 1

Linux started with one developer, who wasn't even taking it serious. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_for_Fun
Re:Just what we need... by riondluz · 2013-03-30 05:03 · Score: 1

who gives two iotas about distro or DM/WM?
Its just about the apps one uses and making sure the data is exportable.
for a clienthost it could be maildirs or gimp files (file-types, *.ext)
for a serverhost its just the data (sql,configs...), which is/shouldbe compartmentalized from the OS, maybe even
virtualized (in containers, kvm/xen,lvm/volumes...) so who cares if i decide to switch from deb2slack or cent2bsd even?

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resist propaganda
Re:Just what we need... by DeVilla · 2013-03-30 05:21 · Score: 1

Not to imply the GP isn't trolling, but think about it. Someone out there is going to think this guy's doing it 'right' and create a separate distro for it. It's like rule 34. There'll be a "Norbuntu" or something like it soon.
Re:Just what we need... by davydagger · 2013-03-30 05:34 · Score: 1

unless you count driver support
Re:Just what we need... by M1FCJ · 2013-03-30 05:40 · Score: 1

Debian... Very unfortunately... http://www.neowin.net/news/debian-drops-xfce-reinstates-gnome-as-default-desktop
This post was written from a Gnome 3 + Debian + Ancient 32 bit laptop which I run as an experiment. So far, it's probably the 2nd worst GUI after Unity I have ever used and this includes Windows 3.1 and CDE and anything that was around in late 80s/early 90s...
Re:Just what we need... by Almahtar · 2013-03-30 06:12 · Score: 1

To be fair it only takes one voice to gather an army. This article alone may do just that. Let's not be pessimistic.
Re:Just what we need... by crutchy · 2013-03-31 23:23 · Score: 1

no standards is what is good about open source... because nothing kills freedom like being forced to comply with some arbitrary standard (often enforced by either government or corporate interests)
you can take your standards and shove them up your ass
Re:Just what we need... by crutchy · 2013-03-31 23:25 · Score: 1

on the contrary... it was their real hatred of the Romans that set them apart

Survival of the Fittest by jarich · 2013-03-29 08:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Agile Artisans

Re:Survival of the Fittest by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 08:16 · Score: 3, Informative

The guys developing Wayland are the core developers of X11.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by ALeader71 · 2013-03-29 08:17 · Score: 2

Agreed. Open Source was never meant to be a top-down heiarchy. Its history will tell you that. Some of RMS' rants speak volumes about how Open Source, like life, tends to break out and do its own thing. I'm all for competition in this category. The major distros will adopt one or the other, or both! The two projects may merge (un-fork?) and become stronger than either could alone. In the meantime, we have Xorg and it works well enough.
So let the strongest triumph over the weaker project. We could have a Street Fighter style "Finish Him" video to hail the end of the lesser. What do you think?

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Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
Re:Survival of the Fittest by SolitaryMan · 2013-03-29 08:48 · Score: 4, Insightful

The good thing about Open Source is that if two contributors strongly disagree on something, both are given an equal opportunity to prove their point. In the end, society wins.

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May Peace Prevail On Earth
Re:Survival of the Fittest by epyT-R · 2013-03-29 09:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

blasphemy! if you're going to use a game analogy, make sure you use the right game. shao-khan will collect your geek card and then enslave your soul.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by TheReaperD · 2013-03-29 09:05 · Score: 1

We could have a Street Fighter style "Finish Him" video to hail the end of the lesser.
Umm... don't you mean Mortal Kombat?

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"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Re:Survival of the Fittest by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 09:30 · Score: 1, Informative

The guys developing Wayland are core developers of _some parts_ of X11. Truth to be told, real Wayland commiters (e.g. Kristian, Pekka) aren't X developers. Others, like Daniel are mostly talking instead committing.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 09:40 · Score: 5, Insightful

No. Instead of working together to resolve their differences and taking the best technical ideas from both groups to enhance the core product, they have a whiny bitch fest, split the development teams, create two products which end up lesser than the original, create an artificial need for more developers, reduce the advancement of the state of the art, and cause people new to the area to spend twice as long researching which products they should use.
In the end, society loses.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 10:43 · Score: 3, Informative

wierd since Kristian wrote AIGLX and DRI2 which are X. Scott is that you?
Re:Survival of the Fittest by Eravnrekaree · 2013-03-29 11:24 · Score: 2

X11 has never been difficult to use. The drivers have often been incomplete or unavailabne which made things hard to use for particular hardware, but this would have been a problem with no matter what window system, the driver situation would have been the same. Nearly all problems people have had are driver relelated and that has nothing to do with x11 itself but rather the lack of driver support for major hardware vendors. The driver issues have nothing to do with x11 itself so its improper to blame x11 for that.
And the reason Linux remains hostile to average users revolves around drivers. People want their hardware to just work and that means drivers are needed for hardware and Linux really should not be so hostile to hardware vendors that provide binary blob drivers.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by jedidiah · 2013-03-29 11:32 · Score: 2

X11 may be difficult to program and maintain if you are a developer.
It hasn't actualy been difficult to USE for a rather long time.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by jedidiah · 2013-03-29 11:36 · Score: 3, Informative

Blob drivers getting you down? Vmware and Nvidia both solved that problem. Redhat and Ubuntu made it even easier.
It's really not the problem some people like to make it out to be.
BLOBS really only become a problem for companies that don't actually want to support Linux. They throw together a kernel specific binary and that's all you hear from them.
With dkms there's really no excuse at all for that anymore.
The kind of vendor that would give you a single kernel BLOB driver is probably a vendor you don't want to use with Windows either. Some stuff is just crap. Some companies are just crap.
You are going to get some crap in a free market regardless of how much you pander to hardware vendors.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 12:15 · Score: 2, Insightful

No. When you try to "resolve the differences and take the best ideas", you end up with a product designed by a committee. And I think there is no need to explain how stupidly over-designed, trying-to-cater-to-all-needs, and generally useless products designed by committee are.

Yes, "survival of the fittest" is generally wasteful in terms of development resources. The results are, however, usually the most fit. Think of this as capitalism vs carefully government controlled economy, and how capitalism is usually referred as the least evil of economic systems.

In the long-term, society wins, and there is plenty of historical data to confirm it.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 12:39 · Score: 2, Informative

Except if history tells us anything, it's that development will focus on the fork with the better leadership/ideas. The "wasted" work will be in the parts they disagree on; they can still share code where the two forks are close enough. Most likely, at some point one will win and the other will fizzle or they will merge together like Compiz.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by dbIII · 2013-03-29 12:50 · Score: 1

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.
Some of the distros are hostile, but some even come with a way to bring in the vendors drivers that is transparent to the user. For everyone else you just download and install them in a similar way to using MS Windows so it's no big deal. I've lost track of the ATI/AMD stuff but with Nvidia it is trivial to install on at least three linux distros - with the last one I set up I didn't even have to configure it for a second screen it just assumed I wanted it to the right of the first one aso just worked as soon as I connected it.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by stenvar · 2013-03-29 13:44 · Score: 1

Most of these splits tend to be over unresolvable issues. They are an indication that a project has hit a dead end. In the end, society wins when such projects die, and this is how they die.
I expect we will be using x11 for a long time to come.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by deathguppie · 2013-03-29 15:37 · Score: 1

Look.. the web is filled with dead projects. Most of which have never been forked. The fact that a project is forked is not statistically or empirically linked to failed projects. Whether or not a project survives or fails is mainly determined by the project lead's desire to make it happen. If anything has an influence on how a project get's on, I would say it is more about user base and the amount of people willing to help it/use it, that gives devs the drive to work on.

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once more into the breach
Re:Survival of the Fittest by dbIII · 2013-03-29 22:07 · Score: 1

That is very misleading - the single person behind the development of AIGLX is not "the core developers of X11".
Re:Survival of the Fittest by squiggleslash · 2013-03-30 02:41 · Score: 1

Well, X11's just a standard, not a bad one even if it probably wouldn't have been designed this way if it were done today. Mind you, of all the surviving GUI infrastructure components from the early eighties it's probably the only one that was built with THE CLOUD(!!!?!!) in mind...
On the other hand, yes, various implementations of X have been difficult to use, that is, difficult to install and get running. It wasn't until the X.org split that real attempts were made to make the system "just work", with previous attempts requiring people run scripts to make "sane" XFree86.config files, which in turn generally needed to be tweaked to ensure the system booted up in a useful resolution. Back in the early 2000s, you actually had to edit the effing text file and restart X (effectively a reboot in all but name given every single GUI program including your desktop would be closed in the process) just to change monitor resolution.
Still, I must admit having read TFA, I'm still utterly confused by the Wayland situation. Can we just accept that while X.org may be imperfect, it's still an extremely functional, fast, powerful system, and we can, and should, focus on it rather than throwing out everything and starting again?

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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by feld · 2013-03-30 04:02 · Score: 1

AIGLX and DRI2 are not X11. They're modules.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by Sigg3.net · 2013-03-30 22:47 · Score: 1

This is a liberalist view (J.S. Mill), which completely misses the goal.
The succeeding projects adhere to principles and existing conditions (what liberalism would call restrictions on freedom) while those who do not are not a valuable contribution to anyone.
What you are saying is correct, just not the way you might (?) think.
Sorry, reading a lot of Mill these days, so it may not have been what you alluded to.

--
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Re:Survival of the Fittest by jbolden · 2013-03-31 00:06 · Score: 1

X11 has never been difficult to use.
Baloney. It is not just a driver issue, though the driver issue doesn't help. Complex config files that overlap in functionality with unpredictability combined with terrible quality configuration tools like xf86config make it by far the hardest GUI to configure properly.
Start with the basics that x11 configuration is based on your videocard chip set, and not the brand name. It is a computer program, computers are pretty good at matching lists with one another, why isn't that data built in?
Re:Survival of the Fittest by jbolden · 2013-03-31 00:16 · Score: 1

Can we just accept that while X.org may be imperfect, it's still an extremely functional, fast, powerful system, and we can, and should, focus on it rather than throwing out everything and starting again?
Nope. We can't accept that. There are deep structural tradeoffs made in the design of X11 which appear to be strongly suboptimal for most use cases. In particular on "fast" it is the opposite, it is slow because of the complexities of buffering and buffers being copied. On powerful because of the lack of integration it is often the opposite very low power compared to the competing systems. And moreover because the codebase is so complex it is very difficult for people to make it better quickly. It is just too hard to learn because of so many legacy technologies that aren't even used.
What X11 is terrific for, is a dumb client (or semi-smart client) running of a server on the same LAN. That use case is a tiny fraction of what users expect. Clients are much smarter than they used to be (though with tablets this might start to reverse) and servers are almost always over a WAN. That in addition to the need to have much more of the app reside on the client (server in X11 speak).
Re:Survival of the Fittest by squiggleslash · 2013-03-31 11:27 · Score: 1

In particular on "fast" it is the opposite, it is slow because of the complexities of buffering and buffers being copied

I'm not entirely sure why you would waste a few minutes explaining why X.org is slow when it isn't, you know, slow.
Perhaps you can also tell us how a tea spoon of table salt will kill you instantly because it's half chlorine, or how most passengers of Delta Airlines are dead because they flew at 30,000 feet, and everyone knows that you don't survive a fall from that height.
The simple truth of the matter is that X.org is fast. It's awesome. Windows, running on equivalent hardware, tends to run exactly the same software with the same or less responsiveness. Games? I'm still blown away by being able to run GTA-IV on this crappy mobile chipset as fast under Ubuntu (with the overheads of Wine, including its DirectX to OpenGL translator) as it is under Windows.
Perhaps your efforts might be better devoted to asking the question "If it's as fucked up as I think it is, how come it's so damned fast?"

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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by jbolden · 2013-03-31 12:04 · Score: 1

GTA uses the direct rendering subsystem. It isn't meaningfully using X11.
There are plenty of examples of running benchmarking apps that can do similar OpenGL calls in OSX vs. X11 or Windows and I haven't seen X11 win one of those in a decade.
Re:Survival of the Fittest by mvdwege · 2013-04-02 06:58 · Score: 1

2001 called, it wants its FUD back.
Honestly, hadn't you noticed that xorg autoconfigures these days?

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Re:Help, I'm being triggered! by dclozier · 2013-03-29 08:14 · Score: 1, Redundant

That's my trigger! Please wait while I get my dongle out. ;)

Yet more fragmentation by atomicxblue · 2013-03-29 08:16 · Score: 1

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*

Re:Yet more fragmentation by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 09:13 · Score: 1

You dumbass. Canonical has nothing to do with this fork. Secondly, how the fuck would you know if Wayland is the best form for replacement? With two of the largest companies (Red Hat and Intel) involved in open source projects, each raking in over a billion dollars in revenue every year, still, after 5 long years, haven't produced anything ready for mainstream consumption. It's time to get their asses in gear.
Re:Yet more fragmentation by us7892 · 2013-03-29 09:23 · Score: 1

I couldn't believe revenues of Red Hat topped 1.2 billion! Where does it all go?
Re:Yet more fragmentation by tqk · 2013-03-29 10:58 · Score: 1

I wouldn't be surprised if they replace the kernel next ...
It's been done. I know of at least two distros that offer the FreeBSD kernel instead of Linux.

--
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
Re:Yet more fragmentation by Motor · 2013-03-29 11:28 · Score: 2

Hookers and blow... obviously

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Give us dirty laundry!
Re:Yet more fragmentation by eric_herm · 2013-03-30 02:25 · Score: 1

Maybe in compilers, kernel, or server software ? You know, all of those stuff that are used everywhere but working almost so well that no one care about them, listed on http://community.redhat.com/
take kvm for example, you likely depend on it dues to the use of vm and cloud, but you do not link the VM that host some blog to RH money, that paid kvm developpers. You send a email, but you do not think "maybe that's because people have been working on the kernel networking side, paid by a company". You do not think "maybe my bank is using RHEL and some security problem were prevented due to selinux or general hardening thanks to stuff paid by RH".
And the same goes to lots of others company too, Intel, IBM, Suse, etc. That's where the money goes. Or to sponsoring of Linux Foundation, Gnome foundation, Openstack, eclipse, etc. Or maybe to lawyers ( see rackspace vs some patent troll, see OIN ).
Re:Yet more fragmentation by unixisc · 2013-04-12 05:13 · Score: 1

Canonical offers FBSD distros? Where?

More information by Darxus · 2013-03-29 08:16 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:More information by lytles · 2013-03-29 09:34 · Score: 3, Funny

nothing he said in there was anything worse than what linus posts, or many open source projects. you could have said "scott - i choose not to make the changes that you'd like. you're free to fork things". instead, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth - claiming that you were being accommodating and then stonewalling him, kicking him when he called you on it, and pretending that he's a bad egg for forking things
if you're going to bad-mouth someone for forking, then you're just playing politics

--
My blog
Re:More information by Darxus · 2013-03-29 10:06 · Score: 1

Linus' behavior is also shameful.
Nobody is badmouthing him for forking. And I never claimed anybody was being accommodating - the wayland project is handling new contributions badly, and a fork was exactly the right way to handle the situation.
We did say he's free to fork things. He still is. We're all still happy he's doing the work he's doing. He's just obstinately insisting on doing it in a way that breaks compatibility with no stated reason.
He's not a bad egg for forking things. He's a bad egg for being constantly abusive to everyone involved in the project for the last year, which he has admitted.
Re:More information by slack_justyb · 2013-03-29 10:21 · Score: 4, Insightful

Because that solution just sounds silly.

The whole point of Wayland, and I could be wrong on this one, is to avoid the mistakes of X. From your solution, we just go back to the days of hack around the core.

The core protocol is flawed and the project shouldn't be afraid to make some sort of shift when there is a pretty good reason for that change. If dude was purposing change for just change sake, yeah I would get it. But the protocol doesn't implement basic window management within the core, and makes it insanely difficult at the plugin level. I, for one, think dude has a point.

That is exactly what happened to X. Everyone was afraid of changing the core protocol, afraid that it would break older stuff. Look where that got it. About a bazillion extensions. At some point backwards compatibility breaks the baker and I know that is hearsay in the OSS community. I know there has been a lot of boneheaded change for change sake forks, but I really don't see this as falling into that category.
Re:More information by Darxus · 2013-03-29 10:49 · Score: 3

Nobody is asking him to keep it out of the core forever. Just making his modifications in an extension so they can be cleanly added to the core (or his extension can become the core), instead of breaking things as he changes it.
Re:More information by slack_justyb · 2013-03-29 11:07 · Score: 2

I'm skeptical that would work. I think it would find its way into perpetual back-burner project. However, that just my subjective $0.02. Some teams are pretty good at keeping themselves out of sand traps, not many though.
Re:More information by serviscope_minor · 2013-03-29 22:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

The core protocol is flawed
Bullshit!
The core protocol is very very good.
There are a fewnow obsoloete bits like the bitmap graphics and fonts, but the rest of the core is fundementally sound.
So, unless you can provide some evidence that the protocol is flawed, then go back under your rock.
Oh yeah and Keith Packard: quotes don't count. He might be a core X11 developer but he's also a one man FUD machine, which is really sad.
About a bazillion extensions.
So? Let me repeat that, so?
The protocol is *designed* for extensions. Extensions are simply the X equivalent of adding more API calls.
Look at Linux: it is a POSIX kernel, but with LOADS of extensions! Does anyone whine "oe woe posix is flawed linux has so many extensions it's fundementally broken lets nuke it stard from scratch and by the way no one needs multi user right?"?
Seriously, who the fuck cares if they're "extensions" or "core", any more that if I care if the networking zero copy super low latency fast stuff is an extension or in the core POSIX system call interface? A clue: no one cares.
No one cares on Windows either! Turns out that Windows 8 implements all those Win32 calls right back to the Win32S (a Windows 3.X era thing) API. Do you hear anyone complaining that because Windows has some old API calls in it that it is fundementally flawed and the mere existence of old APIs taints it? No, because that would be stupid.
Likewise: you know OSX used to allow you to run OS9 and earlier binaries! My got it supports old stuff!! It must be fundementally flawed! Oh my god! Every system supports some degree of backwards compatibility!! They are ALL FLAWED! We must rewrite them all in javascript on the cloud in HTML5 except that all the browsers can render HTML 3.1 so they are flawed too!!!
Here's what astonishes me: people hate X so much that they complain (a) when it's too old and (b) when the developers add API calls to make it more up to date!
Actually, I'm in favour of updating the core protocol, or adding some hefty extensions to reduce latency NX style---though XCB actually is a fair improvement over xlib---but Wayhand is not the answer to that because it removes basically everything.

--
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Re:More information by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-30 03:16 · Score: 2, Insightful

This. a thousand times!
Sacking network transparency for the sake of having animated window transition effects is, what's a fundamentally flawed design.
Re:More information by John+Allsup · 2013-03-30 10:24 · Score: 1

'Optimise the common case' has been wisdom in the *nix world from before we were born. In the case of X, what was the common case when it was designed is not the common case now, and X does not optimise that common case.
That common case is local display, using graphics hardware which is built around 3D and OpenGL.
What the display subsystem needs to do is to efficiently make available the display hardware capabilities of the machine it is running on, in a way that is easy for people to program.
Then there is the question of what a modern desktop environment needs and how to efficiently deliver that.
The design assumptions of X, and the need to work around things using extensions and suchlike, make things harder than they need to be.
If you want your 'evidence', take a look at the size of code and execution time required to do basic and complex tasks using X vs similar situations on Mac and Windows. X solves problems that don't often need solving, and is a poor fit to the situation where it is most often used.

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John_Chalisque
Re:More information by serviscope_minor · 2013-03-30 11:13 · Score: 3, Informative

Optimise the common case' has been wisdom in the *nix world from before we were born. In the case of X, what was the common case when it was designed is not the common case now, and X does not optimise that common case.
X does a fine job of bringing up a bunch of windows, distributing events and providing both direct and indirect hardware access.
Also, optimize the common case is not the same as trash old stuff and remove features for something not demonstrably better.
That common case is local display, using graphics hardware which is built around 3D and OpenGL.
Nope. The common case is still largly a bunch of 2D windows.
I don't do all that much 3D, not that it matters...
What the display subsystem needs to do is to efficiently make available the display hardware capabilities of the machine it is running on, in a way that is easy for people to program.
Certainly.
Then there is the question of what a modern desktop environment needs and how to efficiently deliver that.
I suppose you could say the goal is to build a quality desktop environment, yes.
The design assumptions of X, and the need to work around things using extensions and suchlike, make things harder than they need to be.
Seriously, what is this fetish with extensions that you people have. They are not "workaronuds" they are new API calls. Eveyr system on the planet introduces new API calls when the time comes for it. What is this bizarre double standard holding up X to be something magically pure which isn't allowed new API calls without them being "hacks" or "workarounds".
If you want your 'evidence', take a look at the size of code and execution time required to do basic and complex tasks using X vs similar situations on Mac and Windows.
This is the same X that allows direct rendering, giving programs very direct and efficient access to the hardware and often runs games a few FPS faster than the Windows version of the same game? (Is OSX even in the running here?)
That X? The one that's already better than the two systems you are proposing are better?
Unless you're running a compositor, then X almost completely gets out of the way. If you are compositing, then it almost completely gets out of the way.
For 3D graphics... but a desktop is much more than just 3D graphics output.

--
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Re:More information by OdinOdin_ · 2013-03-30 15:06 · Score: 1

Round trip latency is a problem. X11 object handles could be arbitrary reference exchanges (instead of the client asking the server to create a new object and then waiting for a handle by return of message), this way the client can jump start usage of the object with pipelining. This is where a create object request with my arbitrary reference is sent and I proceed to immediately send more instructions as-if that handle was successfully created. With ability to cope with recovery when the server denies a new handle.
Making the X11 protocol compression optimizations (that also help fix round trip latency).
The bandwidth between a CPU and a GPU is huge, the notion of having a single serialized pipeline between the client and server/GPU is not a good one. In the future I see multiple threads on a client each having their own pipeline to the GPU to be able to instruct it in parallel and maybe even whole widgets sets in GPU instructions. How might X.11 look that working well in such a world.
I'm in the camp that X.11 has had its day and ripping up and starting over does not seems such a bad thing. If applications are already using client side libraries loaded into the clients address space / process to perform the majority of drawing operations and the X.11 protocol to convey input events and copy pixmaps.
It does seems like widget sets are already supporting replaceable low-level drivers so who cares which protocol is actually in use as long as they world. I switched from using Linux as my Eclipse development environment because the X11/gtk combination is too slow on modern hardware, Windows provides a far better experience. I'm just too tired of having to hold the mouse button down waiting for the menu to draw itself, I have other things to be doing than waiting for X11 protocol to do its work.
Also you talk of X11 a being the core (like POSIX or kernel) but really is it GPU silicon that is driving display technology not protocols. Linux needs keep up with that progress in anyway possible.
One day Linux itself will also be just as obsolete as some claim X.11 to be, just maybe not in my lifetime.

Gnome 3 is EDUCATED STUPID! by Thud457 · 2013-03-29 08:19 · Score: 2

ghod, plz DNT mk X11 go all TIMECUBE on us!

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the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

I have movies on my mind.. by nanospook · 2013-03-29 08:23 · Score: 1

Sounds like a merged sequel for Brokeback Mountain and The Matrix!

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Have you fscked your local propeller head today?

Re:When are they going to use motion sensing and 3 by Zontar+The+Mindless · 2013-03-29 08:28 · Score: 1

That's an excellent question.

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Il n'y a pas de Planet B.

Standards by ArhcAngel · 2013-03-29 08:32 · Score: 5, Funny

Standards

--
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K

Re:Standards by Lincolnshire+Poacher · 2013-03-29 21:29 · Score: 1

Ah, XKCD: making cartoons of memes that have existed for 30 years. How unoriginal.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
-- Andrew Tanenbaum
Re:Standards by Dogtanian · 2013-03-30 04:06 · Score: 1

Ah, XKCD: making cartoons of memes that have existed for 30 years. How unoriginal.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
-- Andrew Tanenbaum

Not really- the XKCD cartoon accepted and stated the "there are too many 'standards'" premise as its *setup*. The point it was making was regarding unilateral attempts to *solve* this problem and their unintended consequences.

FWIW, this may have something to say about open source. However, in the commercial world the problem is as much that various parties have a vested interest in ensuring that *their* solution is the "universal" one accepted. This applies even if there's already a more widely-accepted one that would otherwise have become standard and the new version in fact increases the risk of the market becoming fragmented.

For example, the dual layer version of DVD+R from the DVD+RW Alliance (DVD+R DL) came out quite a while before the rival DVD Forum (the DVD-R companies) had theirs ready. Hence +R DL was already dominant in terms of market share and pre-existing drive support. From a user point of view, there was no need for -R DL; it had negligible benefit (if any) over +R DL, was likely to be confused with +R DL while not being supported by older (+R DL only) writers and introducing another format and compatibility issue for no good reason.

No-one needed it (and +R DL remains dominant), but it suited the DVD Forum to give it a go anyway because DVD+R DL wasn't "their" format.

--
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).

"Advance the Linux desktop..." by Torodung · 2013-03-29 08:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

"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.

Re:"Advance the Linux desktop..." by thegarbz · 2013-03-29 10:28 · Score: 2

To advance acceptance we need to provide features that people want, and marketing to show people can get those features. See Ubuntu.
There is no way in heck Debian was going to advance acceptance of linux on desktops due to certain design decisions that make Debian Debian.
In some cases the forks really do help.
Re:"Advance the Linux desktop..." by fa2k · 2013-03-29 10:36 · Score: 1

Why? The good thing about the Internet and open source is that projects with 0.01 % market share or less can have viable communities and be useful to many people. Desktop Linux is a lot bigger than that, and it's doing its job for millions of people around the world
Re:"Advance the Linux desktop..." by Eravnrekaree · 2013-03-29 11:17 · Score: 1

What I have to say about touchscreen devices: these people are walking into stores saying "I'd like to trade in my desktop with its 20" screen, fullsize keyboard, mouse, surround sound, for a weak, puny device with a 4" screen and an on screen chiclet keyboard". That is sheer insanity. Touschscreens portables are a niche market, desktops are for people who do real work. Even a laptop is not equivalent to a desktop in ergonomics and comfort.
Re:"Advance the Linux desktop..." by balise · 2013-03-29 12:58 · Score: 1

Advancing is what must stop.

--
John Eadie [JE46] http://www.c-art.com `one of these days the dogs aren't going to eat the dog food' - Bill Joy
Re:"Advance the Linux desktop..." by Rich0 · 2013-03-30 02:05 · Score: 1

What is needed, before "advancing" anything, is to advance acceptance of the Linux desktop, and IMHO this ain't helping.
That's only true if you care more about acceptance of the Linux desktop than about its functionality. If you work for a company like Canonical that is likely the case. If you get paid the same whether the whole world uses Linux or only the development community uses it, then it probably isn't the case.
People scratch their OWN itches when developing FOSS. That's why there will never be one true linux distro. Sure, the users of that distro would benefit from all the concentrated free labor, but people aren't donating their labor only to make a linux distro that YOU like.
Re:"Advance the Linux desktop..." by eric_herm · 2013-03-30 02:36 · Score: 1

That's free software, anything that would threaten any technology could just be incorporated without any issues in a distribution. Heck, you do not even need to contribute anything back, as Canonical have showed since years. Liberty to fork can go both way, you know.

Re:When are they going to use motion sensing and 3 by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 08:36 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Protestant connection by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 08:37 · Score: 1

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... by Bill_the_Engineer · 2013-03-29 08:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

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...

Re:Ugh... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 08:56 · Score: 3, Interesting

Meh, bought a MAC

You bought a Media Access Control? How much did it cost?

Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-03-29 09:02 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Re:Explanation by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 10:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

+1
It's obvious to anyone looking from the outside in.
They should've just went for X11R8, or X12. That is, just fix the real problems. And reset the clock on best practices by discarding the libraries and interfaces that everybody could agree needed to go.
Unix has it's problems, too. Plan9 proved that there was a much better way to do things. Most new features on Linux are half-assed because of the need to maintain some semblance of backwards compatibility. For example, namespaces---Plan9 executed namespaces perfectly; Linux namespaces are an abomination. And yet... they're good enough. Because reinventing the wheel just isn't cost effective.
Open source doesn't help, here, either. Back in the day it made more sense to reinvent everything, because the code for the current state-of-the-art was usually closed source. You usually had to break stuff if you wanted to fix problems.
But in the land of FOSS, you can actually go around and fix everything, and while much less sexy, it's usually the smarter move.
Re:Explanation by Eravnrekaree · 2013-03-29 10:39 · Score: 1

No need for X11R8. Just a protocol extension using the extension mechanism that was built in particularly for the purpose of extending X for these reasons.
Re:Explanation by Eravnrekaree · 2013-03-29 10:52 · Score: 2

Many of these comments are really off from what I have seen having an in depth knowledge of X and Linux programming. It seems like many just say things without knowing what they are talking about. There are no useless libraries or interfaces in the X standard. You could use the core X graphics primatives to develop an application. Though, there are newer ones that do more. The old ones need to be there for backwards compatability, but the do not get in the way of addign new features. The 2D X graphics primitatives co-exist with DRI apps, and the 2D X graphics primatives can be ported to use the DRI backend by means of a DDX driver that uses DRI as its backend, which will help improve the interoperability of everything. Its the same with Linux itself, there are new APIs that have been added for new functionality but that older APIs can be easily supported without difficulty with good engineering. Adding extensions and new APIs while maintaining backwards compatability is essential to have a useable OS for real, actual users.
Re:Explanation by jedidiah · 2013-03-29 11:43 · Score: 3, Informative

X is fine locally. It's even more suitable as a gaming platform than Windows and that's probably the best metric for deciding how suitable a local display is.
Remotely, X still manages to hold it's own despite being ancient.
With a few tweaks, X can even kind of keep up with RDP.
The real proof comes when you compare X to MacOS. This is a disaster that you have really experience for yourself to fully appreciate. I think far too many people take all of the pro-Apple propaganda at face value.
Remote MacOS is a disaster and that's the approach the Wayland idiots want to take.
Linux applications don't look like "hammered shit".
That's just mindless Lemming trolling.

--
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Re:Explanation by firewrought · 2013-03-29 11:44 · Score: 1

Once Wayland components developers started trying to implement something practical, they discover, one by one, that they need those "unnecessary" X features after all.
Wayland has shot itself in the foot by being marketed as a replacement for X. But it's not really meant to be the entire car: this is just a new engine (that exploits low-level features of the Linux kernel). You could retrofit this engine into the old car (X Windows) or you can build entirely new cars with it. You won't see it on the highway tomorrow, but ~10-20 years from now it might be powering everything and putting a lot of exciting new cars on the road.

--
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-03-29 12:17 · Score: 1

Unix has it's problems, too. Plan9 proved that there was a much better way to do things. Most new features on Linux are half-assed because of the need to maintain some semblance of backwards compatibility. For example, namespaces---Plan9 executed namespaces perfectly; Linux namespaces are an abomination. And yet... they're good enough. Because reinventing the wheel just isn't cost effective.
Anti-Linux trolls are getting more sophisticated again.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by dbIII · 2013-03-29 13:02 · Score: 1

I think you are making the mistake of thinking that linux (and gnu/hurd) was supposed to be something new instead of *nix on x86. It's hitting it's target. Something totally new would be nice but that would be another project with an incompatible aim (since linux is contrained by being *nix). Maybe more work on plan9, an updated BeOS that's more than someone putting a new GUI shell on something else or whatever else is out there on a cutting edge.
Re:Explanation by dbIII · 2013-03-29 13:07 · Score: 2

I'm sure you're just dying to tell us why that fabulous 1980s client/server arch of X11* is really the correct design
The truly ironic thing is when such comments are spewed out in defence of a 1970s style dumb framebuffer constucted with a single user non-networked MSDOS mindset that was backwards thinking even when MSDOS was first written as a cut down single user clone of CP/M.
I don't see this single user, single machine framebuffer approach as a step forward. It's fine for full screen video games but hits problems in other use cases.
Re:Explanation by dbIII · 2013-03-29 13:10 · Score: 1

With a few tweaks, X can even kind of keep up with RDP.
For the many to one and one to many situations instead of just the one to one thing of mirroring a desktop or single window it exceeds RDP.
Re:Explanation by Rich0 · 2013-03-30 02:50 · Score: 3, Informative

The main deficiencies I see with X for remote access are:
1. Applications that insist on client side rendering (maybe some X issue is leading to that, but Chromium is a real pain over a remote connection).
2. It doesn't perform well unless you layer something like NX on top of it. The wire protocol is too chatty or low-level.
3. It needs some kind of middle layer so that you can move applications between displays, and displays between consoles. Think something like screen or tmux. Once you launch an app on a display, it is stuck there.
Wayland obviously isn't going to help with any of this as it currently stands.
Re:Explanation by dkf · 2013-03-30 04:25 · Score: 1

The main deficiencies I see with X for remote access are:
1. Applications that insist on client side rendering (maybe some X issue is leading to that, but Chromium is a real pain over a remote connection).
2. It doesn't perform well unless you layer something like NX on top of it. The wire protocol is too chatty or low-level.
3. It needs some kind of middle layer so that you can move applications between displays, and displays between consoles. Think something like screen or tmux. Once you launch an app on a display, it is stuck there.
The one thing that is always painful with remote access is when you're shipping large and complex bitmaps back and forth, and that's simply because it is when you are critically dependent on the bandwidth and latency. With very complex application-level rendering, you simply don't get good performance when you've not got the app on the same system as the display (avoiding "client" and "server" terms); when they're both local, you've got additional options that provide much higher performance (e.g., shared memory). The trick to getting good performance is to put as much rendering as possible on the display side; tell the server to draw a line or place an image, instead of doing all the pixel bashing yourself (video rendering probably always needs to be done from an app local to the display). Alas, a lot of the things like complex font rendering have been put on the client side in recent years, and that will cause problems with network performance.
I'd say that this is just unfortunate, except that the problem is actually that the people writing the font rendering libraries don't understand the importance of putting rendering in the display engine where it belongs. The font rendering authors are coincidentally also the very same people who are deeply into Wayland now. Funny that. Would it be unfair for me to say that I suspect the real problem is that they're crap at protocol design?
For your third point, transferring an application between displays isn't at all trivial for other reasons. The easiest way to solve it is to have the app actually exist on both displays with a common Model but separate Views and Controllers. That's an app-level solution, not a toolkit-level or protocol-level one. X11 gives you the tools to solve it (as a single app can have many independent display connections open) but doesn't magically do it all for you. (This mattered a lot more when computers had a lot less video memory and so had to use complex rendering models.)

--
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Re:Explanation by Rich0 · 2013-03-30 07:39 · Score: 1

Agreed on just about everything.
I'm not sure that separating the display from the client has to be so difficult. You really just need a way to save/restore state. You don't even need to do it constantly - I appreciate that if you're doing 3D graphics you want to just send the drawing commands to the GPU and never put the framebuffer into system RAM. You just need a way to detach a client which causes the middle layer to start queuing events, the display to dump back its state to the middle layer, and then from that point it starts running that client in a software framebuffer until it attaches to a new display. Sure, it is more complex than screen because there is a LOT more data and associated performance issues, but as long as you have a common protocol defined it shouldn't matter what display the client gets rendered onto.
Now, if the client tailors its drawing functions to display capabilities it will need some way to learn to adjust itself when it moves. However, it already has to handle things like video modes changing and so on.
Wayland has an opportunity to re-establish server-side rendering because they can define higher level widget abstractions and such. No longer is a window a collection of points and lines - it could be menus with associated callbacks, with themes defined by the window manager and so on (perhaps even by a program that runs server-side, maybe even without requiring local plugins). If you give more rendering power to the server then when you click on a menu the server can render it without any client communication at all - the client just gets an event when a GUI element is activated. If you could let the application view logic run in some kind of standardized VM on the server then it could even do stuff that normally requires client-side logic but which is now network-friendly.
The problem is that everybody has some kind of fixation on replacing Windows or OSX for desktop use, and they're tossing aside any use case which doesn't amount to loading a web browser, spreadsheet, and MUA on a laptop. I think this is a losing battle, because those who just need those simple use cases can use any of a number of more established alternatives. I think the power of Linux is in the long tail - those bazillion use cases that the proprietary OSes can't be bothered to support.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-03-30 15:02 · Score: 1

Modern GPUs require huge amounts of data to move from the app to the card...
No.
1. Modern GPUs require huge amounts of data to move from rendering library to the card. This is not the same as application.
2. Networks are INSANELY GREAT at moving huge amounts of data now. What usually kills the performance is the latency. However latency is not a problem when application is constantly uploading things to draw, user won't see them until the frame redraw (that is still every 8-16 milliseconds) anyway.
All this means that X "chatty" protocol may be suboptimal but X extensions model, moving rendering to the server, is the right design decision. It would be eve better if not just OpenGL but UI toolkits and rendering engines had an option to be a part of the server. But that requires some careful design thinking when designing extensions and their protocol, a kind of thinking that it completely foreign for Wayland developers.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-03-31 09:45 · Score: 1

How is X more suitable as a gaming platform given the local buffer copying?
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-03-31 09:50 · Score: 1

You can't do that under X11. Using X11 definitions for server and client. The server must have the buffer for video since it attaches to the video card. The client must have the application buffer since it is executing the code. Because of network transparency this can't just be a protocol but requires at least a RAM to RAM copy.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-03-31 09:53 · Score: 1

I don't see this single user, single machine framebuffer approach as a step forward.
It isn't a step forward, it is a tactical retreat. It is admitting two fundamental problems:
a) For local execution the system must be as fast as possible. And drawing screens are at least for now going to be a non trivial latency issue.
b) For remote execution, the speed of light isn't fast enough to get latency low enough so lots of work has to be done client side.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-03-31 09:56 · Score: 1

Getting to the other side of the world for a light beam if it could travel in a vacuum can take as long as 83 ms. Under real conditions it will be longer. 16ms is under 3000 miles, that doesn't even get you across the country in perfect conditions and that's not assuming round trip issues.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-03-31 09:57 · Score: 1

No you can't retrofit it. Fundamentally the Linux community is going to have to choose whether to design applications for Wayland in which case they won't run on X11, or whether to design applications for X11 in which case they won't take advantage of Wayland's features.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-03-31 12:19 · Score: 1

Yes! You will have a lag of 83 ms! How horrible!
Display subsystem does not need short round trip times most of the time (when it doesn't react to input, moving windows, etc.), so all delays are lags and protocol works just fine. So fundamentally X design is right, and you are complaining about nothing.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-03-31 12:26 · Score: 1

As for the other point: If networks can shift insane amounts of data... THEN WHY ARE YOU USING THE X MODEL AND NOT SHIFTING FUCKING BITMAP IMAGES THAT HAVE BEEN ASSEMBLED REMOTELY. Congratulations you just torpedoed your own case. Genius.
Copying data that is already generated, creates additional access to memory that otherwise would not be accessed. More so if copying implementation has to guess which part of the screen actually updated. There is a reason, in 3D graphics most of the graphics buffer is never accessed by CPU. Now slow memory and local bus (synchronous mechanism) can have greater effect on performance than networking (asynchronous mechanism).

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-03-31 12:35 · Score: 1

83 ms is totally unacceptable. I think we talked about this before and Microsoft in their UI training is finding that when it comes to touch more than 1ms is detectable by humans. Having worked on voice systems 83 ms is very confusing for humans, though still easily understandable. In terms of response to input the this should be about 10 ms on a mouse and 1 ms on a touchscreen.
Re:Explanation by Rich0 · 2013-03-31 23:16 · Score: 1

You can't do that under X11.
Yup, hence why I said these issues were a deficiency in X11. I was referring to some hypothetical design that nobody has actually implemented where there wasn't just two layers defined as they are today.
That is my frustration with Wayland - they're fixing stuff which from an end-user perspective isn't really broken in X11 (just horribly difficult to maintain), and they're breaking stuff that works in X11, and they're not really improving upon it. They're just tossing out use cases which aren't needed to take over 90% of the desktop market, which is all the deep pockets care about.
To me a Linux which takes over 90% of the desktop market but gives up the 0.001% of the market which is only served by Linux is a failure. To others it is a success. Hence all the flame wars.
Re:Explanation by psocccer · 2013-04-01 04:18 · Score: 1

3. It needs some kind of middle layer so that you can move applications between displays, and displays between consoles. Think something like screen or tmux. Once you launch an app on a display, it is stuck there.

I know I'm late to the party, but you can do this using xpra. Still works around the x display idea though, so you can't attach/detach individual windows, but you start them attached to xpra then you attach your x display to xpra. So very much like screen, but I think tmux has some more advanced functions to move windows between tmux sessions.

--
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-01 07:12 · Score: 1

Err.. The compositor already has a copy of the buffer that is sent to the GPU. Why would anyone be stupid enough to read the texture from VRAM.
Because some genius implemented 3D rendering on one host (possibly even in GPU with no display connected), and has to display it on another host. X11 model avoids that by moving rendering as close to display as possible.

The funny thing is after all this network transparency X is so shit that even VNC has it beat for performance (you don't even have to try rdesktop or spice).
No. X11 is faster than VNC on local network with low latency, and still faster over a high-latency network when wrapped in NX (NX does not change the nature of the protocol). The only situation where VNC is faster, is very high latency with no mitigation.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-01 07:26 · Score: 1

83 ms is totally unacceptable.
That's irrelevant because in your example it's the minimum lag achievable with any protocol. Obviously, in reality network lag varies.
Urelated to this, 83ms lag is acceptable for all purposes other than games and graphics/CAD editors -- web browsers, for example, have higher latency, Google Maps takes seconds to update, and they are perfectly usable applications.

I think we talked about this before and Microsoft in their UI training is finding that when it comes to touch more than 1ms is detectable by humans.
Desktops don't have touch interfaces.

Having worked on voice systems 83 ms is very confusing for humans,
Desktops don't have voice interfaces.

In terms of response to input the this should be about 10 ms on a mouse
If that was true, no remote access systems would ever be usable, as 10ms latency is almost never available over the Internet. In reality, I have perfectly usable X11 without wrappers over 25-30ms connection between my home and work.

and 1 ms on a touchscreen.
Absolutely irrelevant because desktops don't have touchscreens, and devices that do, revert to remote-cursor interface for remote access.
In any case, everything you said is irrelevant because no network connection outside a local network, and no protocol, existing or possible, would satisfy your requirements. If your argument is that remote access is useless, it contradicts the fact that huge numbers of people use various remote access protocols constantly. If your argument is, only access over local network is important, then X11 is perfect already because it already works better than everything else when latency is low.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-01 07:33 · Score: 1

This is blatantly false. If server and client are on the same machine, rendering happens only once.
Even if they are on different machines, rendering will still happen only once on the server if it is implemented through primitives supported by X and extensions (such as 3D in OpenGL). Popular GUI toolkits such as Qt and GTK+, render on the client and produce bitmaps, however those are details of their current implementation -- if their performance will become a problem, they can be easily moved into X extensions, and render on either client or server depending on available features and convenience.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-04-01 08:26 · Score: 1

That's irrelevant because in your example it's the minimum lag achievable with any protocol.
No it isn't. You don't make round trips you download client side and make sure to stay way ahead. Which is what MMORPGs do for example. That is the alternative.
Urelated to this, 83ms lag is acceptable for all purposes other than games and graphics/CAD editors
No it isn't. It isn't acceptable for almost any touch based application it is too confusing for the end user. I don't find that sort of lag acceptable in business productivity applications.
- web browsers, for example, have higher latency,
Yes and web browsers have spent 20 years pushing complex code client side to emulate low latency situations.
Desktops don't have touch interfaces.
Some don't. 4-6% of laptops sold 4Q2012 did. That number is going up.
Desktops don't have voice interfaces.
Yes they do. They are migrating over from phones. Apple had to introduce several iOS voice interfaces to OSX and Microsoft has had them for years.
If that was true, no remote access systems would ever be usable, as 10ms latency is almost never available over the Internet.
See above.
In reality, I have perfectly usable X11 without wrappers over 25-30ms connection between my home and work.
Which is likely usable with a mouse. Try it with a touch based application where the applications follows your finger (i.e. more than just pushing buttons) like a paint application.
and no protocol, existing or possible, would satisfy your requirements.
I've given several that work fine. Java applets, Flash, Javascript, thick client .... Wayland is using something like RDP which is working the latency problem by making sure that most activities don't require a round trip.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-01 20:13 · Score: 1

No it isn't. You don't make round trips you download client side and make sure to stay way ahead. Which is what MMORPGs do for example. That is the alternative.
Those are not remote GUI applications. If you want to develop an interface that caches user interactions locally with instant response and talks to the rest of the program remotely, in a generalized way, and with programming model that does not make people poke their eyes out (such as AJAX), you will be a hero of modern computing. Then, maybe people will revisit the question if they do or don't want remote GUI over high-latency links. Until then, the answer is resounding yes, and even lags in tens of milliseconds is better than no access at all.
None of this affects remote GUI over low-latency LANs, as X11 already provides instant response over them, with less lag, better desktop windows management, and better use of accelerated graphics hardware than all alternatives.

Which is likely usable with a mouse. Try it with a touch based application where the applications follows your finger (i.e. more than just pushing buttons) like a paint application.
I don't care about touch interfaces on a desktop, and neither do hundreds of millions of people. Touch interfaces are great for devices that have nothing but a shiny glass surface for the input device. Desktops don't have this limitation.

I've given several that work fine. Java applets, Flash, Javascript, thick client

None of them allow remote access to arbitrary applications. All of them have programming model that makes programmers want to kill themselves when anything nontrivial is supposed to be implemented.

Wayland is using something like RDP which is working the latency problem by making sure that most activities don't require a round trip.
Right now Wayland does absolutely nothing for remote access, Wayland developers merely argue that it will be possible in the future. Remote desktop viewer and server do not provide anything but slow, CPU-intensive screen-copying capabilities, and Wayland does not make any effort to provide anything beyond this (or to even make it possible).

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-04-01 23:39 · Score: 1

None of this affects remote GUI over low-latency LANs, as X11 already provides instant response over them, with less lag, better desktop windows management, and better use of accelerated graphics hardware than all alternatives
Like we talked about before there is a latency problem inside computers too, because of buffer copying that comes up on big screen + lots of stuff + lots of frames. For example what OSX does on the retinas with building virtual screens and then compressing them to get 2x size for text and 1x size for images wouldn't be possible on X11, with today's hardware.
I don't care about touch interfaces on a desktop, and neither do hundreds of millions of people. Touch interfaces are great for devices that have nothing but a shiny glass surface for the input device. Desktops don't have this limitation.
I doubt there are hundreds of millions of people that don't care about touch, heck I doubt there are more than a few million. First off there are only a few hundred million desktop / laptop users to begin with. 85-90% are on Windows and thus are in the process of being optimized for dual usage touch. Most of them own touch based devices, as a result of these touch based devices they have been decreasing the purchase rate for the last 4 years to buy more touch. The Apple crowd most certainly cares about touch, as evidenced by their high ownership levels of touch tablets, which is another huge chunk.
But even if every desktop user didn't care about touch rather than about 1% or so... the touch market is 3x the size of the desktop/laptop market and while the desktop / laptop market is stagnant in users and shrinking in terms of sales the touch market is growing 16% per year globally.
As for touch being to no other sources of input, no. The goal for the next generation must to be support the next generation of Windows hardware like: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-13/
Right now Wayland does absolutely nothing for remote access, Wayland developers merely argue that it will be possible in the future.
We already had this. The RDP protocol has been developed. The intention is to unify it with KDE and Gnome. Wayland's approach is to do that. Wayland itself is not taking this on because from Wayland's perspective RDP is going to look like local execution. Wayland is not trying to achieve a similar effect with a better result by using a different approach than X11.
___
If your willing to address the fact that X11 doesn't solve the high latency problem then something needs to be done to address high latency. High latency is the norm for remote execution. Whatever remote execution system exists needs to work well in high latency not low latency situations. Which means full on remote execution isn't possible but rather some sort of shared execution model. KDE and Gnome can accomplish that by forgoing the idea that it remote execution is going to be generic but rather allow it to be intelligent and GUI specific. Then you introduce sharing so the remote execution subsystem doesn't tie you to the desktop, that is you can use a Gnome app remotely KDE and visa versa. That is the solution.
Frequent round trips need to go. That has to happen. X11 cannot work without frequent round trips. This isn't a complex argument.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-02 14:30 · Score: 1

Like we talked about before there is a latency problem inside computers too, because of buffer copying that comes up on big screen + lots of stuff + lots of frames.
This is irrelevant, and Wayland does not add anything for improvement of those things what X doesn't already do.

For example what OSX does on the retinas with building virtual screens and then compressing them to get 2x size for text and 1x size for images wouldn't be possible on X11, with today's hardware.
This is completely wrong.

I doubt there are hundreds of millions of people that don't care about touch, heck I doubt there are more than a few million.
On a desktop? How many people can touch their desktop screeens with any result other than leaving finger smudges and looking stupid? Touchscreen interfaces are for phones, tablets and kiosks, not desktops. Phones, tablets and kiosks also not known for being used to run large numbers of UI applications remotely.

But even if every desktop user didn't care about touch rather than about 1% or so... the touch market is 3x the size of the desktop/laptop market and while the desktop / laptop market is stagnant in users and shrinking in terms of sales the touch market is growing 16% per year globally.
X11 is intended to be used on desktops and workstations -- it does not matter what is or isn't in demand elsewhere. X11 also happens to work perfectly well on touch-based devices as long as it does not run remote applications. This is a perfectly acceptable limitation, and it still leaves X superior to all other display systems in all uses that they do and don't cover, but X does. Quite an accomplishment, really.

As for touch being to no other sources of input, no. The goal for the next generation must to be support the next generation of Windows hardware like: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-13/
If running multiple touch-based applications remotely while displaying on this device will be too laggy, I won't lose any sleep over that. I am sure, Windows users will enjoy Maya Touch Edition, Photoshop Smudge Studio and Altum Fat Fingers Edition, running locally on that device, but this is not what remote functionality in X is for.

We already had this. The RDP protocol has been developed. The intention is to unify it with KDE and Gnome.
No, there is no such effort, and it wouldn't work even if there was. There are remote desktop viewers and kludges that accelerate them -- worse than remote X is accelerated by already existing wrappers.

Wayland's approach is to do that.
Wayland's approach is to pretend that someone else's amateurish efforts that produced no code whatsoever, will provide a replacement for functionality that already exists in X, and implemented much better than those efforts can possibly produce.

If your willing to address the fact that X11 doesn't solve the high latency problem then something needs to be done to address high latency.
Most of remote X11 uses are over low-latancy local networks. There is no latency problem there. Over high-latancy links, there are already wrappers, and things can be easily improved further within X infrastructure, in a nice, compatible way. Touch interface is irrelevant because it's not used remotely.

Frequent round trips need to go. That has to happen. X11 cannot work without frequent round trips. This isn't a complex argument.
No.
It will be nice if applications had an option to avoid round trips by delegating UI elements response to the device closest to the user. However even if implemented, such things will never cover absolutely everything, so there must be a way to do straight remote UI by default, a

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-04-03 09:15 · Score: 1

This is irrelevant, and Wayland does not add anything for improvement of those things what X doesn't already do.
It allow the application buffer to be shared with the video buffer.
This is completely wrong. [description of OSX]
Sorry I'm not taking this is wrong for an answer. I own a retina, I use a retina, I can see what it does. And yes what Apple claims is exactly what it is doing.
X11 is intended to be used on desktops and workstations
Fine Wayland is intended to be used primarily on tablets, phones and laptops. So there isn't a problem then.
but this is not what remote functionality in X is for. [[touch support]]
But it is what Wayland is for. To support the hardware of the 2010 not the hardware of the 1990s. If your argument is that X11 should exist to support the 1990s hardware, well it did. That happened. It is like arguing that Carter should be elected in 1976 instead of Ford.
Touch interface is irrelevant because it's not used remotely.
The primary touch interfaces are phone interfaces which are almost all client server. Yes it used remotely.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-03 14:00 · Score: 1

Sorry I'm not taking this is wrong for an answer. I own a retina, I use a retina, I can see what it does. And yes what Apple claims is exactly what it is doing.
The wrong part is, that X11 doesn't do this. It had separate font scaling since the very beginning, and scales everything in hardware already. Widget toolkits chosen to implement text rendering on the client instead of adding it to the server in addition to (admittedly outdated) text to bitmap rendering, however there is nothing in X that prevents server-side implementation. Client-side implementation doesn't even involve X, and would be the same on X, Wayland or ZX Spectrum.

But it is what Wayland is for. To support the hardware of the 2010 not the hardware of the 1990s. If your argument is that X11 should exist to support the 1990s hardware, well it did. That happened. It is like arguing that Carter should be elected in 1976 instead of Ford.
There is no demand for remote touch-controlled UI. There is for remote pointer/keyboard-controlled UI. Therefore just because remote touch interface is impossible to implement, it does not mean that suddenly everyone should stop using, or supporting all remote GUI. Maybe we will be lucky, and touch desktop/laptop interface will be proven to be a fad, and we won't have to deal with it at all. Maybe there will be a split between mushy swipe-and-drag "touch" and move-without-response "gesture" interface, the latter is already done very well with a pointer, and has inherent latency, the time that it takes a human to complete a gesture. Maybe new interfaces will utilize a mouse-like object sliding on the screen, so feedback is physical. Phones and tablets, the only devices where fast-responding touch interfaces are necessary, don't need all X features to work for all their applications, but this should not cripple desktops.

The primary touch interfaces are phone interfaces which are almost all client server.
No. UI application runs on the phone itself, it may or may not be connected to a server, but that's not a remote GUI. Whatever it does remotely or with "client-server" model, has nothing to do with remote GUI functionality provided by X -- it can't replace it, and it does not require it (but it can be implemented over it -- my N900 runs X locally, and it works just fine).

Yes it used remotely.
Don't even try this on me. Your argument is that remote GUI is impossible because touch interfaces can not be implemented over any remote protocol, so stick with it and don't try to weasel out. Touch interface can run full application locally and use server as a backend, or even download the whole GUI from the server (in Javascript or similar). This is not a viable programming model for most applications, and not a viable replacement for X. If by any chance you can use touch-based application remotely (as in, no application-specific code, machine or interpreted, is running on the display device), then your whole premise is wrong, however it's still completely irrelevant for X, because then X would be able to do it, too. Unrelated to this, no one cares because things that X is used for on a desktop, remotely, do not need low-latency touch input, and likely never will.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-03 14:16 · Score: 1

Fine Wayland is intended to be used primarily on tablets, phones and laptops. So there isn't a problem then.
This is worth a separate answer.
If Wayland developers announced that their system is intended only for tablets and phones (or "laptops" that are actually tablets with a keyboard taped to them), no one would care what they do, like no one cares about similarly limited display engines of Android and iOS. The whole problem is, they build it as a "replacement for X11", and Wayland development would make no sense at all unless X11 at some point will be abandoned. So their plan is to destroy X11 and replace it with an inferior system, that is supposedly easier for them to develop. Keith Packard thinks, he will benefit because working on internals of Wayland (as it is designed now) is easier than working on internals of X11 (as it exists and being developed now). And I agree with him wholeheartedly. What I don't agree, is:
1. It will not hurt the users.
2. Current Wayland design won't grow into something more complex over time, and surpass X11 in complexity.
My arguments are mostly about the first, as at least one important feature, remote display, is specifically excluded from Wayland design. There is nothing coming from Wayland developers about it but handwaving and dishonest attempts to create impression that someone else is working on implementation of the same feature that will be usable in Wayland. The second is something that I have pointed out in this discussion, because lack of window manager, a supposed "better design" coming from Wayland developers, just shown itself to be not better after all, so someone will have to bring it back in, or even create a fork over it.
Both illustrate my point that Wayland design is inadequate for a desktop that can compete with X on technical merits. The only way Wayland developers can prevail is by spreading propaganda and recruiting GUI toolkits and desktop environment developers to promote Wayland and abandon support for X. This is dishonest and harmful for users.
If you don't want to participate in this campaign (and this is the only thing you do, make background noise that creates impression that Wayland design is somehow superior to X, even though all your arguments are either irrelevant or wrong), please shut up.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-04-04 08:38 · Score: 1

If Wayland developers announced that their system is intended only for tablets and phones (or "laptops" that are actually tablets with a keyboard taped to them), no one would care what they do... The whole problem is, they build it as a "replacement for X11"
I think you are missing something here. Wayland has always been primarily about Linux. Linux has always followed Microsoft's lead for a hardware strategy. Microsoft's hardware strategy is about ubiquitous computing. Supporting the computers of the future, including x86, and supporting touch / voice ... interfaces is the same thing. Wayland is not even going to be finished for several more years. KDE or Gnome taking advantage of Wayland only features isn't going to be for several more years after that. We are talking roughly 2020 when the replacement is even meaningfully underway. And by then that replacement is running on something like android devices or something like mixed mode windows devices.
Either X11 or Wayland has to support 2010 style interfaces. 1990s interfaces, systems that can only support mice keyboards are going the way of systems that only support punchcards and reel-to-reel as an input method.
Both illustrate my point that Wayland design is inadequate for a desktop that can compete with X on technical merits
X is 30 years old. When we talk about technical merits in the other post you keep talking about what X could do. There has bee too much time spent on X lets talk about what X11 does do. And on its technical merits it is terrible. Apple introduced dual video cards on their laptops in 2008, that's a mainstream feature. X11 still doesn't support switching video cards for battery. It doesn't do video. It doesn't do sound. I have had drag and drop video and sound for a decade on my Mac, X11 doesn't even do cut and paste any better than it did in 1988. It doesn't have a built in high speed animations system. It doesn't do touch. When I go on Linux boxes I still often use WindowMaker for comfort, more or less the GUI I was using in 1991. It would never occur to me to use a 2001 much less 1991 GUI on Windows or Mac, the advances have been so tremendous.
So then you say it does remote. Even on remote it is terrible. In the 80s and 90s over a LAN remote was just pointing the X windows around. It was really quite good. Starting in the mid 1990s a security level was needed, and 15 years later it still isn't done! Why not? Either X11 is too terrible to support a security layer, or X11 is too hard to add one too, or the community is too conservative or whatever. But regardless when I need to go run X11 I'm doing SSH -X screwing around with Xhosts files like it was 1997 and still sometimes ending up with windows on some console because X11 got confused. And if I can get the windows I need remote displaying the entire process is breathtakingly miserable as I try and coordinate latencies that are not uncommonly measured in multiple tenths of a second or sometimes even multiple seconds. I remember when X worked with dumb X terms, but it just doesn't work anymore.
We talked about the solution for latency, why the hell isn't it standard in X11? What are they waiting for? Either it doesn't work and there isn't really a solution yet or the system is too screwed up. I don't install extensions to make things work in GDI or Aqua. Apple constantly thinks about latency nonstop all the time. They are relentless in going after latency years before I even notice its there. Microsoft similarly. A mature product is not technically superior if it doesn't do stuff but might be able to. A C compiler can support the code for the colonization of Jupiter. That's different then have the colonization of Jupiter code.
X11 gets graded on what comes out of the box on Ubuntu, on Fedora, on Suse on Apple's X11.app, on Cygwin X11.... That system is not technically superior. It simply does not do anything very well. I can't think of a single thing it does well anymore.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-04-04 09:15 · Score: 1

The wrong part is, that X11 doesn't do this. ... Widget toolkits chosen to implement text rendering on the client
I was around when this switch happened. Documents weren't displaying correctly and systems like TeX wanted application specific fonts so did pdf... I like how the web solved this with a mixture of client and server side on an app by app based. Even better was the way printers did it with server side (X11 definition of server) by default with client overrides.
The point was the separation of client and server creating latency on desktops running local applications.
There is no demand for remote touch-controlled UI.
Microsoft disagrees with you on that. They believe there is tons of demand just no one knows how to do it yet. They are working on it.
Maybe new interfaces will utilize a mouse-like object sliding on the screen, so feedback is physical.
That doesn't solve the problem for touch. It is arguably the worst case. Any delay between the tip of the finger and the "mouse" is highly detectable by humans, for some a few milliseconds drastically reduces usability. Humans respond almost as badly to jitter under those circumstances as they do with jitter and voice. You've been moving your fingers and your eyes see them move since you were a month old. If that behavior changes you and everyone else do not respond well to it.
Your argument is that remote GUI is impossible because touch interfaces can not be implemented over any remote protocol, so stick with it and don't try to weasel out.
That isn't my argument. My argument is that remote GUI is impossible if the remote protocol doesn't know a lot about the client. That it is impossible under X11, does not make it impossible. It makes X11 bad at the job that is its supposed speciality. My argument is that naive network transparency is not the right way.
a) client / server
b) sophisticated (i.e. GUI specific) remote execution
c) web
etc... fill all the gaps for network transparency.
Would a low latency remote execution system that works be good. Absolutely. Had X11 had a security module it could have offered an alternative in the day of active X, and by the mid 1990s we could have had real rich web apps. X11 doesn't offer that.
Unrelated to this, no one cares because things that X is used for on a desktop, remotely, do not need low-latency touch input, and likely never will.
Wait a minute. Your whole argument was that the remote support system needs to support all application not just some select group. If you agree that X11 will never support huge and growing classes then all it is just one possible remote execution system. And Wayland supports X11. So for those apps that want to use X11's remote system Wayland support it.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-04 13:07 · Score: 1

I think you are missing something here. Wayland has always been primarily about Linux. Linux has always followed Microsoft's lead for a hardware strategy.
This identifies you as a Microsoft astroturfer. It also explains why you are bringing piles and piles of unrelated problems, imaginary problems, or problems solved long ago, just to create an impression that you have some kind of arguments.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Re:Explanation by jbolden · 2013-04-04 23:17 · Score: 1

Yep Microsoft astroturfer who uses a Mac, that's me. BTW Microsoft owns one of the commercial X11s.
As for the problems, those aren't imaginary problems they are real problems.
Re:Explanation by Alex+Belits · 2013-04-05 02:18 · Score: 1

Yep Microsoft astroturfer who uses a Mac,
Microsoft astroturfers have no shame, why would it bother them?
Please don't pretend to be an Apple astroturfer, Apple gets enough support from genuine fanboys, and you are not an Apple fanboy, you are gushing with excitement every time you mention Microsoft products.

that's me. BTW Microsoft owns one of the commercial X11s.
So what? Microsoft can't use it to improve software they actually sell, so they are trying to destroy all implementations of X11, just like they were always trying to destroy Unix-like systems despite having involved in Xenix, and despite still having a Windows-based sad mockery of Unix somewhere among their products.
It's very consistent over their whole history -- they even spent enormous amount of effort on sinking OS/2 that was written at large extent by them. Once it became clear that they can gain more by destroying a superior system that fallen outside of their control while slapping an inferior one onto every computer, it's all-out war on everything technologically superior.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.

Re:When are they going to use motion sensing and 3 by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 09:07 · Score: 1

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)

Next Woburn/Billerica by us7892 · 2013-03-29 09:21 · Score: 4, Funny

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....

Re:Next Woburn/Billerica by Intrepid+imaginaut · 2013-03-29 09:26 · Score: 3, Funny

I'm waiting for the Wayland/Yutani fork myself.
Re:Next Woburn/Billerica by dccase · 2013-03-29 09:52 · Score: 2

Allston/Brighton as well
I don't know.
In theory, being able to render good cheap food and live music sounds great. But it will attract way too many hipsters.
I hope there will be fewer headlines about Wayland because I live there and always click before remembering.
Re:Next Woburn/Billerica by dbIII · 2013-03-29 13:13 · Score: 1

After the last attempt at a similar project I'm thinking they should call it East and West Berlin :)

Good luck to them at actually producing stuff but they do piss me off with all the "X sux" stuff before they can show better results in even rigged demos.

Re:While the emerging display servers fight it out by ewieling · 2013-03-29 09:28 · Score: 4, Informative

This is what people did when Sun's NeWS, Display Postscript, Berlin/Fresco, and Y Window System were released. You are in good company..

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I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.

Another fork? by SplashMyBandit · 2013-03-29 09:30 · Score: 2

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.

Re:Another fork? by Urkki · 2013-03-29 18:20 · Score: 1

This is part of the natural development process of any project of sufficient size. There is the old way (X), which some think is all that anybody needs, the project to replace it (Wayland), and then people who think some mistakes are being made, which results in forks. Same can happen i n corporate world behind closed doors too, even forking when parts of organization do not agree and one level higher management doesn't/can't stop it.
In open source world, it is all in the open and there's nobody to stop it, so just enjoy the show, or jump in and be part of it if you think you have what it takes to feature on slashdot!

Re:And, still, nobody seems to believe me. by gbjbaanb · 2013-03-29 10:15 · Score: 1

Even commercial software has the same problem, though the bigger products do tend to become a single entity simply because no-one else has the resource to work on it.

eg. look at Microsoft's data access technologies - ADO, RDO, ODBC, Jet, DAO, OLEDB, LINQ2SQL, EF3, EF4.

Then look at commercial companies - you want a DB, you can have Oracle, SqlServer, DB2, just to name the 3 most popular.

The "trouble" with FOSS is that there are enough people who want different things and can modify what exists rather than work with the existing teams, but also that the existing teams think they know best and have an arrogant dismissive attitude to others. Mind you, that also applies to the new contributors who think they know better than the "morons" currently managing the project.

I guess we all need a better sense of professionalism in the industry, but until that matures to the point where continually churning technology is seen as a good thing, we'll just have to put up with the way things are and let evolution decide which product becomes the one everyone uses.

Why was he banned? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 10:24 · Score: 1

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.

Re:Why was he banned? by Darxus · 2013-03-29 10:53 · Score: 1, Informative

--- Day changed Tue Mar 12 2013
12:28 I DONT GIVE A SHIT what you ignorant people think about attitude, politics and a bunch of crap that doesn't even matter ...
12:32 soreau: FYI, not giving a shit about people is exactly your problem.
12:32 Darxus: You're a fucking idiot
Also:
http://www.chaosreigns.com/wayland/soreau.html
Just a couple nice, recent examples.
Re:Why was he banned? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 15:30 · Score: 1

You're both fucking idiots. If you really wanted your projects to succeed you'd spend less time being whiny bitches on the internet and more time coding.
Re:Why was he banned? by eric_herm · 2013-03-30 02:32 · Score: 1

In a software project, if you want to have growth, you need to have coders. So you have to manage coders more than code. In this case, that mean getting thing clear so future developers do not have a wrong view of the project later.

Northfield + Weston by AaronLS · 2013-03-29 10:32 · Score: 3, Funny

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.

Re:While the emerging display servers fight it out by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-29 10:35 · Score: 1

I think I'll just stick to the tried and true X11.

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.

Someone Forgets History by christurkel · 2013-03-29 10:38 · Score: 1

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/

Re:Someone Forgets History by dbIII · 2013-03-29 13:25 · Score: 2

Depressing. Half the point of X is that I can have people using MS Windows 7 running interactive applications on linux nodes with interaction that is indistinguishable between those and local applications. The OS the user wants to use and the OS the application has to run on shouldn't get in the way of putting the stuff the user wants onto their display.

Re:what's wrong with X? by Darxus · 2013-03-29 11:56 · Score: 1

http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on-the-X-protocol

You have only worked on trivial problems by Tenebrousedge · 2013-03-29 12:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.

Re:You have only worked on trivial problems by unixisc · 2013-03-30 01:24 · Score: 1

I agree that there is something to be said for more choices being better. But there comes a point when there are too many choices. For instance, when KDE was the only game in town (aside from the CLI), there was certainly a dearth of choices. But today, where you have KDE, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE, Razor-qt, Enlightenment, Windowmaker and what have you, somewhere, distros ought to draw a line and offer a sane number of choices.
Similarly, on the windowing system, I think it would have been better had people tried to take the windowing systems that we had in the 90s - be it NeWS and Display Postscript, and make an open source windowing system based on that. Or the Wayland project was fine, but in parallel, also have another application that addresses the remote connecting capabilities so that people don't think that any necessary part of X11 is being excluded. On Mir, if Canonical is building something exclusive to Unity, not an issue at all - one can just treat it as a one of Canonical special, just like Quartz is for Apple. But this project - Northfield and Norwood - seems more into tossing newer variables into the mix.
While choices are good, one major issue w/ Linux is that there are too many variables in which way things can be combined - kernel version#, glibc version#, GTK+ version#, Qt version#, and finally, the DE chosen and then that version#. If that ain't enough, we now would have to choose b/w X11, Wayland and Northfield. Next, it will be version# of Wayland or Northfield#.
Problem is that there aren't enough people to test all these possible combinations on all types of hardware to get a guarantee that something will be rock solid. The 'millions of eyeballs' are definitely not there, or else, every FOSS project would have been a solid piece of work. So as these projects mutate, there are more things to work on, and fewer people to work on them, and the result is lower quality of everything.
Re:You have only worked on trivial problems by jbolden · 2013-03-31 00:01 · Score: 1

For instance, when KDE was the only game in town (aside from the CLI)
there never was a point where KDE was the only game in town. KDE was the first GUI for Linux. There were plenty of application launchers that ran on top of window managers prior to KDE. FVWM95 was rather popular (example RedHat) before KDE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fvwm95.png
also have another application that addresses the remote connecting capabilities so that people don't think that any necessary part of X11 is being excluded.
That's already done by another group.

Nobody Likes Binary Blobs by tuppe666 · 2013-03-29 13:05 · Score: 1

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.

...still not convinced

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."

Re:Nobody Likes Binary Blobs by dbIII · 2013-03-29 14:24 · Score: 1

Hasn't been forbidden though or even made more difficult - thus internal grumbling about it being annoying instead of outright hostility.
If software patents die or the ex-SGI people at Nivida that remember the patent troll court case that SGI was hit with retire that source code will probably be opened up within a couple of weeks.

Re:The primary commit history for the past year... by MBGMorden · 2013-03-29 13:24 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

Re:what's wrong with X? by dbIII · 2013-03-29 13:36 · Score: 1

While very interesting with a lot of good points about XCB I can't see any of that having anything to do with Wayland since the main problems identified are about network issues that Wayland has no intention of going near. All that stuff gets handed over to whatever screen scaper you'd need to put a Wayland desktop on a different display.

Re:If that's really true.... by Alex+Belits · 2013-03-29 13:41 · Score: 1

For the same reason why streets are not being rebuilt with sidewalks in the center and traffic lanes around them. Some design decisions are actually good.

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Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.

Re:While the emerging display servers fight it out by stenvar · 2013-03-29 13:48 · Score: 1

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..

Outted? by twistedcubic · 2013-03-29 14:22 · Score: 1

...The developer, Scott Moreau, has been outted from the project...

I think you mean ousted.

Re:Hahah by Millennium · 2013-03-29 14:43 · Score: 1

The folks behind Wayland and the like do have some valid points. The way people use X has changed drastically in the years since X11. Generally that's been for the better, sometimes for the worse, but there's certainly no denying the difference: there are entire subsystems in X that no one uses anymore. We should be using X12 to make a clean break with that.

Nothing was really wrong with the protocol. If we're going to be swapping image buffers around from now on, I'd prefer something more along the lines of Rio's insanely clean protocol, but X, VNC, or Wayland could all do. However, the Wayland folks do seem to be trying to get rid of X simply because it's X, and that's just gratuitous.

What I want by Compaqt · 2013-03-29 15:22 · Score: 2

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

Re:What I want by jbolden · 2013-03-31 10:05 · Score: 1

Excluding the last item, nothing in your list is impossible or more difficult with Wayland. Wayland doesn't help, Wayland doesn't hurt.
For the last item Wayland is using something like RDP. There are some Wayland hooks but fundamentally the core of this will be KDE and Gnome for the next few years.

The wrong fork by artbristol · 2013-03-29 20:10 · Score: 1

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.

Re:The primary commit history for the past year... by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2013-03-30 01:40 · Score: 1

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.

Re:While the emerging display servers fight it out by dkf · 2013-03-30 03:57 · Score: 2

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'!"

Re:Hahah by Almahtar · 2013-03-30 06:21 · Score: 1

X11 FOREVER!!! !!! !!!

... he says after suggesting we probably need X12

Re:The primary commit history for the past year... by Bo'Bob'O · 2013-03-30 07:12 · Score: 1

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.

Re:what's wrong with X? by Almahtar · 2013-03-30 07:39 · Score: 1

Yes. It can. It supports X as a client. Am I the only person listening?

Re:Ugh... by rtfa-troll · 2013-03-30 08:20 · Score: 1

Meh, bought a MAC

You bought a Media Access Control? How much did it cost?

The problem is the IEEE only sells them in blocks of several thousand. Individually they are cheap, but if you want just one then it's gonna cost you.

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=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();

Fork feasibility - W/W possible; N/N not by dakra137 · 2013-03-30 13:01 · Score: 1

Forking Norwood and Northfield is not feasible. By car there are about 94 miles and almost 2 hours of driving between them.

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.

Splitters! by arglebargle_xiv · 2013-03-30 14:07 · Score: 1

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).

Re:The primary commit history for the past year... by jbolden · 2013-03-30 23:56 · Score: 1

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).

Re:While the emerging display servers fight it out by jbolden · 2013-03-31 01:42 · Score: 1

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.

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Wayland/Weston Gets Forked As Northfield/Norwood

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