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Gnome 3.12 Delayed To Sync With Wayland Release
sfcrazy writes "Gnome developers are planning to delay the release of Gnome 3.12 by approximately a week. It's a deliberate delay to sync the release with the availability of Wayland 1.5. Matthias Clasen (Fedora and Gnome developer) explains that 'the GNOME release team is pondering moving the date for 3.12.0 out by approximately a week, to align the schedule with the Wayland release plans (a 1.4.91 release including all the xdg-shell API we need is planned for April 1). The latter 3.11.x milestones would be shifted as well, to avoid lengthening the freeze period unnecessarily.'"
A delay for the First of April?
Who can believe that?
Gnome 3 - Windows 8 for Linux
I've read through the Wayland site and another half dozen pages that are obviously over my head and I just don't understand what Wayland is or what it's advantages are. I think it's suppose to be replacing X11, but I don't really understand X11 either, other than it's a method of getting things onto the screen. So I'm throwing my ignorance out there hoping I won't be flamed out of existence and someone can explain or point me to a laymen description of Wayland, and/or X11 and how one is better than the other. It seems like it should be a big deal since I've read there's been a lot of dissatisfaction with X11 for quite sometime and yet no one's ever done anything about it. That is until now, if Wayland is in fact a replacement
I'm sorry I realize this has been discussed several times and I'm sorry I'm just not getting it.
Say, forever? MATE with Xorg is much more suitable than either Gnome or Wayland.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
If gnome wants to stay relevant it should support X as well.
X11's far more than mature by now. You can expect ongoing support in various capacities for decades - it's just that widespread.
Show the entire summary, instead of a "read more" link, in the weak beta site and it will suddenly become more viewer friendly. This needs to be fixed NOW. Why are pictures necessary, taking up space, just because other sites post pretty pictures?
Like many people, my chief concern over Wayland is 'network transparency. Unlike some others, I'm willing to believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Specifically, with X based systems, X remoting is no longer the way I use X remotely, I use xpra as it delivers me a better experience. Unlike something like NX, Xpra does not try to extend or enhance X based protocols, but instead gets content by setting itself as the compositor, knowing things like window relationships to each other and being able to do things like recognizing a tray icon for what it is.
My question is if the same sort of thing would be possible with Wayland today and if people are doing it.
I am entirely amateur hour at this and may have mischaracterized, but I'm willing to hold out hope that the one major fundamental downside of Wayland could be overcome in the same way that Xpra makes X better.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Good grief!!! Is this crap still going???
X is an application that runs on a computer with a graphics card. A graphical application can then use the X libraries to send drawing commands over the network to an X server, eg "draw a line", "draw a box", "display this bitmap", "display this string in font zzz". Note that the concept of "client" and "server" are somewhat reversed from the normal meaning - the X "server" runs on your desktop, the client can run somewhere in a datacenter. Think about apps processing major datasets and then generating some output...makes sense then for the "client" to be on the larger computer.
The X "server" also controls keyboard/mouse/etc, sending events to the relevant client apps.
The problem with X is that the whole design no longer matches what client apps want to do - eg interact with 3d-capable GPUs, use exactly the fonts they want (rather than asking the X server to use the font with a specific name, and hoping the server has that font available). And the network layer inbetween adds latency. And the set of commands that X supports is now so large that the server is huge - making it buggy, full of security holes, and difficult to maintain.
Wayland is basically the lowest-level parts of X (handling the graphics card), plus a very simple API for clients - it accepts bitmaps only, no "draw a line" stuff. And no network support - clients are local only. Client apps can then code directly against the Wayland APIs (ie pass it bitmaps, often generated by interacting directly with a GPU to render 3d graphics into a buffer). Fast, simple. Or clients can code against the original X API, in which case the drawing commands are sent across the network as they always were, and then are handled by a slimmed-down X-server which executes the commands and passes the resulting buffer to the local wayland server.
In practice of course, most apps will code to the GTK or QT apis, and it is GTK/QT which is responsible for interacting with Wayland or X.
There is also code in development to create a "wayland network protocol" where clients can generate images (on whatever computer they are running on - which might have a GPU), and then send the (compressed) image over the network to another wayland server where the user actually sits and sees the graphics. This is a kind of "RDP remote desktop" mode - and according to many people will actually out-perform the old X way of doing things, as well as being vastly simpler to implement/maintain.
The transition from Gnome2 to Gnome3 was an awful one for me. I bet there was a meeting somewhere that went like this...
...Yes, I'm bitter. Yes, I've moved all my machines to XFCE (MATE looks useful, but less mature/stable ATM). If I wanted a confusing UI with limited customization, I would just use OSX. The fact that anyone willingly uses Gnome3 bewilders me. IMHO, they should have done this: continue to keep Gnome2 as "Gnome", fork the code, and call Gnome3 something different (KDE8-X or something).
Designer 1: Gnome2 is way too simple! Look at this Windows 8 - they totally outdid the rest of the world!
Designer 2: Yes, and look at this OSX - girls love it!
Dev: Totally! Let's re-do all the menus/toolbars, and then we'll make it the new default on (insert list of gnome3 distros here). Everyone will love it from day one, and nobody will experience any loss of productivity! It will be a great resume builder for us as well.
All: Yay!
Why am I the only one confused?
They say delay 3/13 release date a week to align with a 4/1 release of Wayland. But that is more than two weeks, so what exactly is getting aligned? Even if it were the same day, they would have no time to address any problems that arise.
What am I missing?
X is a decent windows environment, but does have a few noticeable holes. Wayland could be the holy grail, with an emphasis on _could_.
I know I don't.
A GNOME 2 fork meant to keep it alive after the GNOME developers abandoned it to work on the new version. Same old junk, new name, for people who for some reason don't want to move on.
the big problem is that all this desktop crap doesn't matter. oh, sure, it's pretty. does it get work done? compared to, say, OLVWM from ages ago. sure, I think wiggly windows are a cool hack, and like to use a GPU to make things smoother. but most of this desktop stuff is just masturbation-by-coding. dbus, systemd, wayland, most of gnome, any form of skinning, etc.
yes, X-over-ssh is non-negotiable. it would be great if the X-now-wayland wankers did their wanking on some more-async, lower-bandwidth interface that didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. VNC, I think not. Xcb was about the last good idea to come from these people...
pretty soon desktops will be completely irrelevant, since the only GUI of the future is html*.
I liked my slashdot nostalgia, put it back
Linux is not Unix. The people writing the kernel are not out there to do Unix. You're free to go to BSD and likely stagnate there.
You're entitled to your opinion of course, but I think you should respect those who do like it. In response we won't trash what desktop you like.
Come on slashdot, are you deaf?
I no longer care about Gnome3 anything. It's bloated crap. It's slow. It's "new generation" crippled GUI. I like it as much as I like Windows 8.x. Fuck Gnome.
Just like glibc!
They have gotten the 'datacenter' part, but it's true that generally from say an X station point of view, you can use it from your desk and someone from the data center could also use it. But the server is not some big iron thing, it's just a simple client.
It is being ported to GTK3 so that makes it a lot more relevant. If they just kept it at GTK2 then yeah it is useless. Of course they are in direct competition to Cinnamon which provides a similar GNOME 2 interface.
They do support X. It will be awhile before GNOME completely switches to Wayland, at least 3-4 releases.
I'm sorry you didn't like GNOME 3. There is an ever increasing number of people who have found GNOME 3.10 to be pretty good. You do have to adjust to it, but most of hte defaults are sane and you don't have to tweak it and for a lot of people that's really the attraction. Just set it up and go.
I'm looking forward to the Wayland-based DE's of the future. There's a Linux distro that allows you to test out the weston compositor ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rebeccablackos/) and it can pull off some pretty neat effects. My favorite is rotating windows with any sort of content, and they will still work perfectly. You can rotate pictures, text boxes, videos, what have you at any arbitrary angle. I also enjoyed how well it avoided screen-tearing. Shaking a window in any current Linux DE or in Windows will cause screen tearing for me, but I did not experience that with RBOS.
What is the problem on Gnome if you have multiple virtual desktops and lots of windows on each of them? Virtual desktops work about just like in Gnome 2, except that they are dynamic by default - they are created when needed and removed when they are empty. And I would say moving windows to different virtual desktops is much easier under Gnome 3 than what it was under Gnome 2.
Under Gnome 2, if you had lots of windows open on one virtual desktop, the task bar was starting to get unusable - it was really hard to find correct window from the full task bar with really small icons. It is much easier under Gnome, when you can see window previews on overvime 2, since so much contribution effort are now given to MATE project for example. I will not be surprised that MATE will overtake Gnome 3 in a few years. I fact, I hope this will be the case, because projects that are unable to understand his users base will see there contribution effort going down over time.ew screen. It will get crowded as well, but not as fast as with Gnome 2.
And how exactly Gnome 3 breaks apps with multiple windows? Multiple terminals? Or Dia? I haven't seen any breakage.
That may be beyond the point of diminishing returns. It's true that GTK or QT has the best opportunity to have good primitives for a network connection and provides the ability for remote applications to appear even more seamless with local applications in cases of theme differences, but the work would be a lot more complicated than it was implementing the X primitives that were relevant in the 80s. On addition to being very difficult, the coupling between client and server would be tighter (if application goes to render a widget the display doesn't have due to version mismatch, that could be a problem).
On the otherhand, realtime encode of desktop display is actually pretty serviceable nowadays. You still want the ability to recognize very high level elements for what they are to provide the goodness of network transparency (this is a 'window', a 'dialog', a 'tray icon'), but perhaps not require that the display understand what region of a displayed window is a button versus something else.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
After 10 years of menu clicking, and memorizing positions on the menu where I maneuver the mouse, so as to begin an application, I now have a favourites bar on the left, a large "somewhat useless" frequent window, (I use it as a last recall list). and a set of tweaks which truly make this interface a real winner. One of the tweaks gives you the Gnome2 interface while at the same time you have Gnome3 to use for the grandparents who prefer icons to menu lists.
Before you shoot G3 dead, evaluate and install some of the tweaks. GNOME will again become your favourite
Leslie in Montreal