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GNOME 3.10 Is Now Properly Supported On Wayland
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."
(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.
Now I can complain about the user interface on a whole new display technology!
I wonder if there are new features removed from GTK3, or forced on users, or if GTK3 themes break again. This affects non Gnome 3 users sometimes (e.g. File/Open puts you into "Recently Used", wasting a bit of your time and clicks, in a app that uses GTK3.)
GNOME 3 is now at 3.10? Who'd have thunk it?
But how ready is Wayland itself for mainstream release? I know they've gotten as far as version 1, but are any of the distros - Fedora, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, et al - near having Wayland ready so that one can install something like GNOME or KDE w/o installing X11, but installing Wayland?
No doubt, I am cheering the open source drivers to continue their great progress but I can't understand why Nvidia and AMD don't enable EGL extensions on their desktop drivers (especially AMD since I'm a shareholder because they started supporting open source). With Mir and Wayland needing the extensions, Gabe Newell saying Linux is the future of gaming, and the future of Linux windowing being Mir or Wayland, I'm not going to get super excited until one of the Big Two GPU vendors start supporting it.
And I'm hoping it's you, AMD, that will be the first to claim that crown on Linux. Please let it be in the forthcoming hardware Newell mentioned.
Really disappointing choice of version numbers.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Can someone explain this with a car analogy?
Still no stable binary release of GTK+3 for Win32. Any word on when that's happening?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Yeah, dont hold your breath on that. They are pretty much committed to the line that their interface is great, it's you users that suck, and need to be shipped off for re-education if you dont like it.
In reality it's a trainwreck that epitomises what you can get out of a large group of 'designers' who dont have any real work to do.
The larger question I have, and asked many times before without getting any sort of satisfying answer is - what does Wayland provide that X cannot? X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine, and provide MORE not less capability than Wayland.
NIH syndrome?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
More importantly, when will we see GNOME 2 support?
But in fact it's NOT properly supported.
If you read the wiki that the article poster linked to, there are all sorts of caveats and missing functionality. "Properly Supported" means functional parity, and from where it sits right now, there is not functional parity.
Don't care about Wayland. I gave Intel my money, and in return they have 30 Developers, that have given me an astonishing return on my hardware. Hell they can still use X as far as I'm concerned.
I do care about the Gnome Shell and how to kill it with fire...I currently use Cinnamon, but do not want to continue to patch my Desktop , and I do care if Gnome is going to (continue) to cripple my Desktop experience. these two articles http://worldofgnome.org/gnome-upcoming-features/ http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/08/gnome-core-app-project-make-me-excited-for-desktop-linux show off the new core applications Maps, Music, Photos, Software & Calendar...ans they look great, only it looks like oversized icons/Buttons; "not over-burdened with features"; "built around the premise of ‘finding and reminding’ you of your files". Yeah I am nervous too.
How about they expand on evince(a fantastic program on any platform) by giving it epub compatibility. Rhythmbox has just been updated codename "I Eat Tapes" http://worldofgnome.org/rhythmbox-3-0-is-eating-the-tapes/ which is looking great after being much neglected for Banshee(Which was great) in the Mono push to satisfy some self serving... anyway great; modern looking; desktop app, not even mentioned. Hopefully I can finally get rid of the awesome Tomboy notes with Notes(Bijiben) ready so I can ditch Mono altogether (Cue that self serving prick to spout crap to retain reverence soon).
The bottom line is I don't want my Desktop experience Tabletified. There is a great hybrid touch/keyboard+mouse interface in here somewhere, and some great ideas, but my main computer is not about find...its about organising files not search; Sensible user of a 24" screen and accurate pointing devices (and I include pen too); Feature rich presented sensibly with good defaults...only removing unnecessary "options". There is something great here, but Gnome is taking too long at fitting the pieces together.
X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine, and provide MORE not less capability than Wayland.
X11/Xorg is very well tested but largely misses the point on current platforms, if it's not outright causing problems and forcing workarounds.
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...
Why do Linux desktop/window manager developers want to emulate Microsoft windows? If you want to steal things try and steal from someone like Apple, please.
There is no Linux windows manager that follows a tile/wiget/wall paradigm. Apple OSX is basically the old desktop paradigm which is the same as Gnome+Cinnamon; XFCE; KDE etc etc although is starting to go iOS round the edges.
This is a great leap forward for desktop Linux and we must remember the open source luminaries that have made this advance possible, starting with Mr. Mark Shuttleworth. Mark committed to making significant contributions to Wayland back in 2010, and generously offered to support KDE and Gnome in the transition. Wait, what? They never contributed a single line of code? They were secretly working on another project and are now in a pissing match with Intel??
This is interesting, you see, I have heard this before. There's a lot of handwaving about having to support old programs that YOU dont use anymore (which you equate to NO ONE uses anymore, incorrectly, but I digress) but you dont give me a single concrete example where this has actually caused any sort of problem. I dont hack the xorg code to say myself but I have heard people that should know telling me that while there is a ton of legacy code the maintainers have to check occasionally, it's not a big deal for them, and it doesnt affect anyone else. The only bit in here that I know to be true is that it increases disk requirements but then again it seems to me like if disk space came up in the context of a discussion about using a WM vs a DE, you would be one of the ones calling me an idiot for caring about disk space in this day and age.
In my experience the only thing that makes X slow is unsupported hardware. Which is understandable. On systems where the necessary support is implemented it tends to run faster than Windows/Mac/Slowaris or whatever else the computer can run. I havent seen any convincing evidence that the performance hit from backward compatibility or from the extra abstraction layer (which permits remote X among other things) is very significant at all. And it's not like this is really stuff no one uses. Thinking that is just myopic.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Check this presentation by Daniel Stone (one of the X.org developers) on the problems with X.~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine,
[citation needed] ....unless you want to concede that Windows 8 "seems to work fine" too.
The larger question I have, and asked many times before without getting any sort of satisfying answer is - what does Wayland provide that X cannot? X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine, and provide MORE not less capability than Wayland.
Anybody who has looked in the innards of X knows its a pig. No secret there. It's only Unix fanbois that cannot fathom that some parts of Unix were not properly designed from inception.
Most of those have been patched over the years (e.g. security which initially was non-existent, internationalization, which still lags Windows/Mac but is closing in). X is one of the few remaining *big* mistakes in Unix. It was designed with the wrong philosophy and overtaken by actual usage. Wayland is an effort to clean up and refactor the code.
My favourite bit of the linked article...
Seems you can justify anything in UI design if you include the magic words "bloated, fragmented and space consuming" in your rationale.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
None of that works: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/422/no-corners/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner/
I agree. The Wayland developers have convincingly argued that X11 is a broken heap of cruft, and non-backwards compatible changes seem to be needed to fix that. But as you say, that could be done by updating the protocol itself. Judging from the X version number, that has happened many times in the past, but somehow we've gotten stuck at version 11 for a long while now. Make X13 or X14 the redesigned version with all the cruft removed, and use the versions between there as a deprecation buffer.
Anybody who has looked in the innards of X knows its a pig. No secret there. It's only Unix fanbois that cannot fathom that some parts of Unix were not properly designed from inception.
At 15:19, David Stone has a nice slide that says:
xserver 1.0.2: 879,403 lines of code
xserver (now): 562,678 lines of code
That's 300,000+ lines of cruft they wiped out without breaking the X protocol. Wayland is currently about 20,000 lines of code, that's about 3.5% the size. Even if that doubles they're still getting rid of 90%+ of the old code, that's huge.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They couldn't fix X. The developers behind wayland looked at what it would take to do the same thing they are doing but do it with updates to the X code. They saw a process that would take 20 years rather than 5.
X has 20+ years of legacy code, on a modern X install you are using at best 5% of the code. When you've reached a point where 95% of the code and application isn't even being used it's time to start over rather than work to upgrade what you have. You would spend so much time troubleshooting old code that you could literally rewrite the entire thing 4 times before you finish.
Wayland is designed like a modern interface that is used on almost every other OS. It's designed to be as simple as possible while being extensible. It isn't trying to be anything but a channel for programs to talk to graphics hardware. X was everything and the kitchensink as you said everything from drawing lines on vector displays to keyboard and mouse. X was a monster that's time to deprecate and replace.
X was so "ahead of its time" that its entire architecture was dumped in version 10 to give way to X11, and then it remained so far ahead of its time that to this day NextOS, MacOS, Android and Windows have yet to adopt a single thing from it, contrary to the rest of Unix most of which has made its way into those operating systems.
And no, it was not designed to access resources from the desktop. It was mainly designed so that you could use a dumb terminal to access your server. When it became clear that was pie on the sky, instead of redesigning the turd, they just added layer upon layer of cruft, so you ended up with a dumb as doornails protocol running on a heavy weight, expensive "dumb" terminal.
Wayland is an effort to remove those layers of cruft that nobody uses (Xtoolkit?)
Lastly the web browser has nothing to do with Unix. It is platform independent. The fact that you think the web==unix shows how little you know about deep OS architecture.
Thanks to Mr. Coward, I have seen the light. It is clear to me now that Canonical is essentially an open source Machiavelli, manipulating other players such as Redhat and Intel with ease. The Wayland devs, shamed into action, are now producing the next generation display server which Canonical will then use instead of their Trojan Horse display server.
Not to be the KDE fanboy here, but Okular has been able to do that since . . . I dunno, whenever many years ago I first tried clicking on an EPUB.
At this point it almost seems like classic GNOME fans might be better off using KDE and themeing/fiddling with it to make it look and behave how they want. And KDE doesn't even make you write Javascript extentions to do any of that, it's all in the actual UI to customize it . . .
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I really do think the KDE devs are going about it the right way, leveraging the Model-View paradigm to make it so most of the code can remain the same but the UI/UX can be changed for different circumstances. So if you do install on a tablet, you can have a full-screen launcher and nice finger-friendly icons and such, running what are underneath completely compatible programs. But if you run a desktop, you have the full and unfiltered desktop experience. You don't really have to sacrifice one for the other (well, the tablet side is taking a bit to entirely come together, but that's mostly hardware support, and if we're going to sacrifice either I'm sure we're all fine with our Android tablets or whatnot in the meantime, no need to muck up the desktop).
I'm typing this from a KDE install right now, loving Lancelot Launcher and Yakuake, and pitying my Windows-using colleagues when they don't have tabs, split-views or SFTP support in their file managers (and chuckling a bit about their Windows 8 angst). There were some scary and awkward times in the beginning of the KDE4 transition, but these days KDE is back to be stable and solid, and whatever layout and behaviour you want you can pretty much do it (the mere thought of which must drive the GNOME devs into panic attacks).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
At this stage of my life I can honestly say I don't care about attempts at being different, just for the sake of being different. Execution is far more important. I'd rather a copycat of Windows/OS X which had more features and was overall better and more versatile (GNOME 2), than something which was completely new and hard to establish a comfortable workflow with (GNOME 3 - well, Gnome Shell specifically).
Being different is not a virtue if the outcome is rubbish.
The dumb terminal at that time was a VT100.
By dumb terminal I mean a thin client, something that didn't happen.
X mostly ran on engineering workstations.
Not by design dude. It was meant to run on thin clients but it ended up being such a pig that you needed a workstation to run it. At the time a "thin" X-client was more expensive that a PC.
I'm not sure why you think that is "pie in the sky" since it worked and continues to work rather well.
So a protocol designed to run on a cheap thin client ends up needing a powerful workstation to run and you call it "working rather well"? With those definitions it's no wonder you consider X a success.
Part of the reason for that was because the protocol was rich enough to transmit graphics primitives at a higher level than a bitmap. Nothing dumb about it.
No one uses such primitives because they are incredibly sucky. Hence VNC and such.
I did find NextStep and NeWS superior to X11 and it's a damn shame they didn't succeed
Of course, anything was better than X11. Steve Jobs famously declared "X11 is brain dead".
Thin clients did happen, but they didn't catch on. In fact, one of the main Xorg developers, Keith Packard, worked on some in the 80s. Sun Microsystems created the SunRay product line that provided a thin client environment to their SunOS/Solaris and Linux platforms, although the protocol was proprietary and not X, likely due to the same reasons Wayland was created. On a side note, Keith's presentations on why X sucks are some of the best and worth viewing to understand why Wayland is so important.
When I was using a thin client, it was a great experience when you used a very simple environment and no animation, such as an XTerm in TWM. The experience quickly deteriorated when you tried to do many on screen changes and lots of interactivity, which is common for people simply surfing the web on most pages such as facebook. This was compounded when you had some 16 clients on a single host server.
Mac OS X, Android and Windows are consumer operating systems, for which eye-candy UIs are considered more important than network transparency.
Windows was for the office from the get-go, and I think you'll find fewer and fewer PCs in homes now that there are tablets. It suffers from the fact that it was originally written as a standalone OS and not designed for networks. OSX was completely rewritten using the BSD kernel, which was Unix-based. Unix was originally written to be networked. People screamed bloody murder when they made the change, but it was necessary.
Eye Candy has nothing to do with network transparency. There's so much eye candy in all the non-server OSes because they can -- PCs are thousands of times faster than when Macs and Windows first came out. Networks are a hell of a lot faster, too.
I saw your comment while metamoderating, whoever modded you "troll" got marked down. They should have left it at the default (at worst overrated maybe) but no way is it a troll. Moderators, please read the slashdot FAQ!
Free Martian Whores!
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).
The two billion different window managers out there supporting every imaginable workflow would like to have a word with you. Yes, they're still out there, despite all the efforts of the "userfriendliness" crowd to break them.
Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, but at least we can claim to attempt to lead, instead of just blindly following.
The problem with GNOME isn't whether it sucks (I haven't really used GNOME since the crap that was 2.0, so I have no opinion on how good or bad it is), it's that they have decided that their way is the only way and have taken over independent projects (like GTK, the "G" really doesn't stand for GNOME and it is definitely not only used by GNOME applications) and are forcing their views on those as well.
The FLOSS community used to be about cooperation and choice, but lately it seems to be more about which corporations can hire the most developers to force their vision onto the projects they support without any regard to the rest of the ecosystem.
At that time, were there really any DEs? I thought that the only thing X was used for was running multiple consoles on a single giant screen
That's... a bizarre statement and completely meaningless. In fact, it's intellectually dishonest.
The X11 was developed purely because X10 wasn't generic enough in its hardware requirements. That was it.
But even you could legitimately describe that as dumping the entire architecture (which, I think, we can legitimately call an outright lie), that would still have nothing to do with whether the X Window System is ahead of its time. X11 and its predecessors feature a network transparency system that were uncommon at the time of X11's development.
This is exceedingly dubious. A "single thing"? Really? In fact, pretty early on Windows started to adopt various incompatible network display protocols to counter the fact it didn't have native network transparency. Did it do it exactly the same way as X? Of course not, architecturally X11 was completely incompatible. But it did make the effort. Did Android? No, Android post-dates X11/Unix by decades, and is intentionally stripped down. Android also doesn't require network transparency in a fucking phone screen. "NextOS"? NextStep used Display Postscript early on, one of whose advertised features was... yes, it's a shame Apple dumped the technology in favor of something inspired by PDF, but the world changes.
AmigaOS was also ahead of its time. You could legitimately argue that operating systems since bear no resemblance to AmigaOS, whose shared-memory space message-passing multitasking environment had its flaws as well as its advantages. But to argue that AmigaOS can't be described as ahead of its time when it was doing in the 1980s what many operating systems are still doing poorly today would get you laughed at.
But X11, unlike AmigaOS, never went away. And so we're familiar with its flaws, and we focus on its flaws and not its strengths. And its strengths are, absolutely, huge.
Wayland is a tragedy. It should not exist as a project. It's taking the jewel from Unix's crown and throwing it away in favor of a candy wrapper because the jewel has gotten a lot of gunk on it over the years and nobody's thought to just polish it.
No, it's not. Wayland is an effort to replace X11. It will end up, after a few years of people hacking around its flaws, with just as much cruft as X11, but unlike X11, it'll never have the promise. It'll never be able to do in 25 years from now what X11 can do today.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Let me sum it up:
1) the people who know X best, say it sucks.
2) I've programmed on it from its very early days (Xlib, Xtoolkit, Motif, all the way to the present) and it sucks.
3) The people who developed graphic subsystems thereafter (NeXTSTEP, MacOS, Android, Windows) avoided it because it sucks.
4) The developers of Linux are dumping it because it sucks.
5) You defend X by talking about "network transparency" (the mating call of the X11 noob). "Network transparency" is a rarely used X11 feature which is fully supported in Wayland as an extension. So the rare few people who need it will have access to it.
So, pardon me, but I'll stand by my statement: X11 sucks.
p.s. "The X11 was developed purely because X10 wasn't generic enough in its hardware requirements. That was it." Around here that is considered an architectural flaw, as it couldn't be fixed by a simple extension of the protocol.
The larger question I have, and asked many times before without getting any sort of satisfying answer is - what does Wayland provide that X cannot?
Wayland provides severe broken-ness and an inability to work on remote systems. It's designed to bring all the uselessness of MSWindows to the Unix world.
You defend X by talking about "network transparency" (the mating call of the X11 noob). "Network transparency" is a rarely used X11 feature which is fully supported in Wayland as an extension. So the rare few people who need it will have access to it.
and YOUR feeble excuse that network transparency may or (more likely) may not be available as an extension does NOT help if it is not always available BY DEFAULT on any system you may need to remotely connect to. If Wayland becomes widely implemented they way *you* want to see it done, it's highly likely the overwhelming majority of systems will be forever isolated and unreachable. For all that will give us, you might as well be using the Point-and-Drool MSWindows interface you seem so hot and horny to emulate. It certainly would make my job significantly more difficult.
Make up your mind. Either it is useful in which near every one will apt-get the extension, or it isn't in which case it won't be installed.
Your reality in which is useful yet people don't install it is absurd.