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Intel, Red Hat Working On Enabling Wayland Support In GNOME
sfcrazy writes "After shooting down Canonical's Mir, Intel and Red Hat teams have increased collaboration on the development of Wayland. Developers at Intel and Red Hat are working together to 'merge and stabilize the patches to enable Wayland support in GNOME,' as Christian Schaller writes on his blog. The teams are also looking into improving the stack further. Weston won't be used anymore, so GNOME Shell will become the Wayland compositor. It must be noted that Canonical earlier committed to supporting and embracing Wayland. Despite that promise, the company silently stopped contribution, and it was later learned that they were secretly working on their own display server, Mir. Intel's management recently rejected patches for Mir, leaving its maintainance to Canonical. Before Intel's rejection, GNOME and KDE also refused to adopt Mir. Intel's message is clear to Canonical: if you promise to contribute, then do so."
It's exactly what the Linux desktop needed! Thanks, everyone!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I've read the article on Wayland at Wikipedia, but I still don't know why they want to replace X.
Is it just me or does every bit of news in the past year or two about Canonical seem designed to make people hate Canonical? I mean Shuttleworth has always been a wannabe Jobs, but lately it feels more like he's taking pages out of Gates' book ...
So sad given that, for awhile, Canonical was the source of Linux's revitalization (and now they're just "those assholes that hate the Linux community").
KDE's support is also in the works but further down the line. I think later 2014 or early 2015? Can't find the schedule at the moment. Enlightenment 18 has partial wayland support with full support expected in 19.
FINALLY we're going to be free of X. Of course, I still suspect it will take some time to iron out the wrinkles to the point where the experiences on wayland for the various DE's are relatively bug free and are as smooth as butter.
Will Red Hat support MIR too? I don't think unity will be right for everyone.
Canonical seem to be steadily trying to create a single 'us only' distro. Good that others are seeing through this.
so that we can reach our goal of having a full featured and stable GNOME
So...a single non configurable button with the word "NO" written on it? Heck, we can do that already with what we currently have.
"They" are all integrating platforms vertically, either by in-house efforts or by partnerships/alliances. It will be interesting to see who the survivors will be, as there will be no prisoner taking.
Redhat?
For those that are not aware of his past, Jim Whitehurst--CEO of Redhat--was once Vice President of Boston Consulting Group...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Consulting_Group
(see following list of other employees of BCG)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_employees_of_Boston_Consulting_Group
As I pointed out is another post ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4183357&cid=44792345 ), Boston Consulting Group is a central component of the "1%" and their influence around the world.
Redhat is fully involved with the NSA, as is Intel (look at the links I provided in my other post). Neither company can be trusted for anything anymore. All of their products are now questionable in terms of NSA backdoors as a result of their previous (and in my opinion, ongoing) relationship with the "Big 3" consulting firms as well as the NSA.
Blacklist those involved, and start looking for alternatives. Permanently. And, please, do not take my word for it--research these people yourselves, make the connections yourselves...come to your own conclusions. Start trusting your own instincts, rather then swallowing everything in the media (including Slashdot...there be spies here, too).
Like or hate Ubuntu they recognize the consumer trend moving to low power SBCs. ARM is already dominating in this market and, according to wiki:
these parts [of mir] include Android’s input stack and Google’s Protocol Buffers. An implementation detail in memory management shared with Android is the use of server-allocated buffers which Canonical employee Christopher Halse Rogers claims to be a requirement for “the ARM world and Android graphics stack”.
So to me, it seems like the push towards Mir for Ubuntu is compatible with their vision of handheld, low power, devices completely replacing the desktop. This may well be the future of personal computing, and if I was Intel I'd want a seat at that table.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I use KDE. Period.
If KDE doesn't work with Mir, and Ubuntu forces Mir with the 13.10 update, then I won't be updating to 13.10 from 13.04.
I may well have to do a reinstall with LTS, from what I'm reading. And that would piss me off to no end.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
MicroXwin (http://www.microxwin.com) is a completely new X windows implementation which is small, fast and compatible withe standard X. Here is a video of MicroXwin performance on Raspberry Pi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zttcdPtJN8A Raspberry Pi is some what dated. Here is a video of MicroXwin on more recent SOC such as Allwinner A20: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T18FhSTQ08k
Nice to know. :-)
On X, you can have a Gnome application running on KDE and vice versa, will this also be the case when the desktops will use Wayland?
Or do you have to use XWayland to ensure that this interoperability still works?
vi is a *beepity beep beep* text editor.
Emacs is my favorite operating system.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I dont care if its Mir (which I found to be superior) or wayland (which I believe will be the one with fast adoption and fully supported by the restricted drivers)... just give me the fastest solution and for god sake, fix the starting up "resolution change thing" that make impossible to display a fucking logo correctly...
It's not going to be as simple as recompiling the existing applications for a new qt or whatever. It's going to be a matter of rewriting the applications to support whatever changes have been made to behaviour in qt to work on Wayland for the bits it doesn't have out of X and the new bits that are not in X.
It also means a lot of hard work will have to go into qt or whatever to blit to the Wayland framebuffer instead of all the bits that X currently handles to do the same. E18 already has something along those lines with evas which is worth reading about (www.enlightenment.org) if your interest in the subject is real.
The more you understand about the subject the more your blind certainty will crumble. The Wayland developers are "confused" because they are trying different approaches to determine the best ones and didn't just choose one by gut feeling - there's nothing wrong with uncertainty when you are making something new. The first alpha version is not going to be a magic success.
I understand Wayland's purpose, but I also hope they do not ditch X11 too soon as it has been around for many many years and ensures maximum compatibility. Personally, X11 does enough for me and has good enough performance. Let's just not make the same mistake that Gnome did, by ditching the old ways too soon before figuring out the new ways first. If X11 continues to be developed, I will definitely continue to use it.
While I pretty much agree with you, for my personal taste and use-cases, that compositing has nothing actually important to offer, allow me to play devil's advocate, somewhat. Okay, maybe not devil's advocate... call it long-term thinking versus whatz-innit-for-me-today thinking. Whether compositing is important depends on your long-term goals.
compositing advantage #1: for desktops, compositing has been supported by osx since 2001, and by windows since 2007 (it was supposed to be 2004-ish but longhorn was delayed). The reason you need a gig of ram, minimum, for a functional system nowadays, plus a video card with 3d gpu acceleration hardware, is for the bling. When I say need, I of course actually mean want, and when I say you, I of course actually mean Aunt Tillie(tm). So, the advantage of compositing is that, Linux machines can show off the same bling as osx and vista/win7/win8 machines have. This is not an important technical advantage, functionally speaking, but it is arguably a necessary marketing advantage.
compositing advantage #2: "old" hardware, which is to say older than about five years old, is fundamentally unusable with all the modern bling and 3d acceleration and such that apple and microsoft are pushing. Linux is not driven by the same forces... and although Linux *offers* compositing, and the majority of current X window-managers default to using it (plus wayland and mir the up-and-coming-X-replacements always use it), that does not mean that every Linux graphics-stack and every Linux distro *must* be full of bling and fully composited and so on. WinXP is hitting EOL -- no more security patches -- in 2014. There are quite a few Linux distros that are aimed squarely at this market, e.g. PuppyLTS fka WaryPup is tested by the head distro author with 128mb of ram and a dialup-modem. So, compositing advantage#2: as the proprietary vendors add bigger and bigger fins (GUIs)to the back of their bloated boats, and require more and more massive engines (CPU/GPU) to simply check email, and gigabytes to open a few browser tabs, Linux will inexorably become the only option on older hardware.
compositing advantage #3: in the specific cases of wayland and mir, building in the compositing at the window system level is apparently a requirement for tiny smartphone and tablet screens. With desktops, transparency and other compositing bling is not really necessary -- with tiny screen real-estate, so I hear at least, sometimes you can make something intuitive which would be much more difficult sans the transparency tricks. So, advantage#3 is that the core windowing-system for upcoming linux distros (mir with unityNext on ubuntu and wayland with gnomeNext on redhat respectively -- other distros to-be-announced) will already be tablet-friendly and smartfon-friendly, by default. Not related to compositing, but for the same reason (mobile-device-friendliness) both mir & wayland are based on OpenGL|ES rather than desktop-oriented OpenGL.
These advantages add up to form a pretty good justification for compositing. On dtops, need to match features of osx and win8, that regular consumers have been trained to expect. On old boxen, Linux has plethora of distros that will take over -- compositing by default in mainstream consumer distros will not phase the Puppy Linux folks, or any of the other low-resource-distro-authors (Connaectcannotspellthat and Slitaz and prolly others I'm not familiar with); they are savvy enough to yoink compositing, if required. Last but not least, rather than android(tm) which has a GPL kernel but is otherwise stripped of the usual linux infrastructure -- e.g. SurfaceFlinger for graphics rather than X -- the arrival of compositing-by-default opengles-by-default wayland & mir will permit regular Linux distros like ubuntu and fedora to run like a champ on tablets and phones.
At the end of the day, even if I don't personally care a whit about compositing, having compositing properly supported will strengthen the overall libre ecosystem, and get more folks using libre stuff. That *is* an advantage to me: expanding the community will help me directly, which means the compositing feature is helping me indirectly. I would suggest the same logic applies to most of us here.