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Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions
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."
I have never seen a good argument for this.
Read the article, then.
* 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.
The only argument I've seen is the lack of network transparency, often poorly worded with no actual technical argument behind it.
Sounds like you aren't interested in hearing the arguments, but I'll try. Practically all X11 apps can run remotely - the ones that can't are likely to be inherently limited, like video players or 3d first person shooters that have bandwidth and latency requirements that are transport constrained. Outside of those types and pathological configurations, remote X11 just works for all apps.
V) "Wayland can't do remoting." Wrong. Wayland should be BETTER than X at remoting, partially do its asynchronous-by-design nature. Wayland remoting will probably look a like a higher-performance version of VNC, a prototype already exists. And this is without us even giving it serious thought about how to make it better. We could probably do better if we tried.
"We haven't given it serious thought" is a particularly bad approach to convince people to quit bitching. Show us a well thought out plan to support per window/application remoting, not vnc-style desktop remoting and that will shut up practically everyone. Act like you really don't give a shit and nobody will have any confidence that it ever will "better than X."
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