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GNOME 3.10 Is Now Properly Supported On Wayland

Posted by timothy on from the not-just-a-lawn-ornament dept.

An anonymous reader writes "One week ahead of the GNOME 3.10 release, all of the basic Wayland support for GNOME has been merged. With today's GNOME Shell 3.9.92 release the Wayland branch was merged and there was also an updated Mutter Wayland release, besides earlier GNOME 3.9.x packages fostering the Wayland support. Fedora 20 is expected to ship with GNOME on Wayland as a technology preview. Additional details about the current GNOME Wayland support are available from the GNOME Wiki."

3 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. For those who didn't know... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    (and didn't want to google it):

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29
    http://wayland.freedesktop.org/

    Wayland
    Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain.

  2. Re:Now make GNOME work by Dimwit · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not that Wayland does a whole bunch that X doesn't, it's that X has a lot more hoops to jump through to keep going. Wayland just presents what amounts of a framebuffer and a simple protocol to let the compositor and clients communicate about size changes, movement, available displays, etc.

    All of the modern graphical environments and applications are using the COMPOSITE extension to X, which adds an extra step to a lot of graphical operations. Plus, to be "X", you have to support things like the old X line-drawing primitives, fonts in the server, and other things that simply aren't used anymore. Important things like changing the screen resolution are kept in protocol extensions that you have to check for before using. Large amounts of code and protocol are dedicated to working with screens of vastly different capabilities - everything from monochrome monitors to "true color" displays. Nobody has a fixed-sized monochrome X terminal anymore, but the code has to account for it still.

    Plus X stores a ton of things in the server, making it big, slow, and a source of potential security/information disclosure issues. Wayland stores less and does less.

    In other words, developers are hamstrung having to maintain and work around lots and lots of very old code that will never, ever be used by a new application, ever, but has to be there, even though it slows things down, takes up space, and makes things more complicated.

    Personally, I would've liked to have seen something more like "make COMPOSITE a part of the core X protocol and deprecate lots of things" and see X slowly evolve into a more "modern" system, but that's just me.

    As for GNOME - I realize that GNOME 3 is different from GNOME 2, but I'm at least happy that for once the Open Source community *tried something different* instead of just aping Windows or Mac OS X (though GNOME 3 is obviously inspired by the latter). Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, but at least we can claim to attempt to lead, instead of just blindly following.

    --
    ...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
  3. Re:Now make GNOME work by raxx7 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check this presentation by Daniel Stone (one of the X.org developers) on the problems with X.~

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44