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Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions

Posted by Soulskill on from the where-there's-a-will,-there's-a-wayland dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In clearing up common misconceptions about Wayland (e.g. it breaking compatibility with the Linux desktop and it not supporting remote desktops like X), Eric Griffith (a Linux developer) and Daniel Stone (a veteran X.Org developer) have written The Wayland Situation in which they clearly explain the facts about the shortcomings of X, the corrections made by Wayland, and the advantages to this alternative to Canonical's in-development Mir."

9 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Remoting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Better remoting than with X11? Seriously? I'm in!

    Just recall to support authentication (certificates, kerberos, and/or ssh piping), and root windowless operation, and you will get every admin that works in corporate environments at least to test Wayland. If it manages to fulfill the promise on better reactivity (== better usability), Wayland will catch like wildfire.

    1. Re:Remoting by Nerdfest · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I really appreciate what Cnonical has done for Linux. I think they've helped push it to a much wider audience than it would have had otherwise ... but I'd liek to know why the hell they can't play nice with others and use/contribute to Wayland, KDE, Gnome, etc? They've come up with their own desktop, which is not bad, but now they're creating Mir instead of Wayland, and are apparently creating a new package manager as well. We'dget much better products out sooner if everyone worked towards the same goals.

    2. Re:Remoting by spitzak · · Score: 5, Interesting

      * apps having to do all the rendering. What about apps that don't do this now? Are we really going to force them through X, or will there be some middleware they can use, etc?

      Apps can use the Cairo library to render. That is what most of them are doing now anyway, since that is the only practical way to get antialiased lines and scalable images on X.

      * the mini x server solution... there was a problem noted due to the change in coordinate systems. How will that be solved? What other problems may we run into? etc.

      The problem was not really described correctly. The Wayland developers have this idea that applications should not know what their window positions are (I don't agree with this btw). X applications when they do the X api to figure out the window position are told it is at 0,0. On X an application wanting to make a popup menu not go off the screen, compared it's window position to the screen position, and thus knew where to place the menu (on Wayland the client says what position it wants the menu in (relative to it's window) and is told how it will be clipped, so the client can try another position). This means some errors with the popup of menus in X applications.

      I was under the impression that they "fixed" this by allowing the X emulation to get at the secret information about where the window is. I complained on the mailing list that this means that X clients have a special privledge and they really should allow regular clients to get this secret info, but was ignored.

      * the network transparency question. They haven't completed this yet. They may not ever do it (might be 3rd party). There's already some other attempts at this that show something can be done with it, but it's just not finalized yet. We just have to wait and see.
      * remoting apps, and how that will relate to interoperability. Sounds like I'll be able to pull an X app up on my local Wayland desktop and have it displayed using the built in mini x server (maybe). What about the reverse? How do you export a Wayland app to a client that is only running X.org?

      It looks like they are planning to use per-window RDP. This makes sense because the api and remote clients already exist, and you would run an X RDP client to display the Wayland windows.

  2. Sounds like it's still "all pixels" by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Each application does its own rendering? 31-bit pixel counter?

    This sounds like it's all pixels, like X, rather than geometry, like NeWS or display postscript.

    So if I have monitors with high resolution I still have to tell all the applications to change their size, individually, or use a microscope to read the text, right?

    If I stretch a window (intending to scale it, rather than just see more of what it shows) it has to go back to the application for re-rendering, right?

    And if I have adjacent monitors with different resolutions they won't match up. Heaven help me if I lay a window across the boundary between two, the T between 3, or the + between four. Right?

    Or have I missed something?

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  3. Re:The Manchurian Candidate by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why not fix X?

    The simplest and most obvious answer: it's easier and faster to just not bother and start from scratch.

    In addition, X was originally written when networks and client systems were slow(er). Many of original design decisions are no longer appropriate with respect to the X server code complexity and maintenance requirements. A long (long) time ago, I wrote a program (called CXC - Concurrent X Control) to manage the low-level X protocol (think everything in the X11 Volume 0 book) and support transparent X traffic interception, blocking, redirection and insertion for a CBT application (called CAST) and, if I remember correctly, I remember wanting to off myself (or at least start drinking heavily) after trying to make sense of it all. Just my $.02.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  4. Not a good architecture for alternate guis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    With the release of hardware drivers for the Raspberry Pi I decided to investigate Wayland a bit further.

    One thing that has confused me about Wayland is "where are all the alternate GUIs?", X window managers number in the hundreds with every man and his dog writing one.. The extremely basic GUI seen in Weston has barely changed in years.

    It seems that Wayland has thrown away X's 'mechanism, not policy' mantra, and the architecture combines device drivers, the display server and the window manager into one blob (the reference one being Weston). This means that every alternate GUI needs to know how to talk to hardware, instead of just how to lay out windows and control them, it's rather laughable. At least turn the hardware support and abstracted device driving into some sort of library,. Also there's practically no documentation on Weston to use as a basis for another GUI, and the code is barely commented.

    Wayland may be good, but it needs many more years of work at the current rate and still has some big issues;

    1) The terrible architecture that I mention above that makes it difficult for people to build GUIs.
    2) Driver support needed for running, that doesn't seem to be forthcoming from some of the biggest names in graphics cards.
    3) The fact that we'll need to run X clients in Wayland for years, if not indefinately. Negating most of the arguments of "but we can throw away the crusty bits of X, hurrah".

    I'm not going to discuss the X remote support issue, I think that one has been done to death :)

  5. Re:The Manchurian Candidate by Coryoth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've seen demos of Wayland that had per window remoting, including moving and cloning per window across different diplays. Wouldn't it be nice if xmove still actually worked for most applications? If you could just move your application across Xservers as you wished and didn't have to worry about temporary network outages killing you application? Well apparently Wayland can do that. So it seems to me that Wayland has potentially more to offer in terms of network transparency than X. It isn't done yet, so let's wait and see. Everything I've seen looks very promising.

    --
    Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
  6. Re:show me hello world on my own pc or STFU by Beardydog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not worried about it, or complaining about the difficulty of installing it, as I'm aware that I'm currently not the target audience (although the Apache comment was hyperbole). Just wondering if I had missed anything, or if the current situation really was "build xwayland or gtfo." It sounds like the answer is, "build xwayland or gtfo."

  7. no, thanks, Wayland, I need REAL networking by dltaylor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I use the networking capability of X (process on IP address X using display on address Y, same or different IP, different user) every day, all the time.

    For example, I always run a X server on Windows boxes, because I can then run some Linux process on the Windows display "root" window. Productivity is higher because I don't have to switch "containers", in order to switch applications, and copy/paste is trivial.

    Similarly, I can have a process in a different, more locked-down, user running on the root window of "my" desktop, toggling between applications without having "switch user", open a different VM, ...

    I'll keep using X11 as long as I can.