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Official Wayland Support Postponed From GNOME 3.12

Posted by Soulskill on from the wayland-waylaid dept.

An anonymous reader writes "GNOME 3.12 was going to have official Wayland support as one of its main features for the upcoming desktop release. The developers have now decided to delay the official Wayland support until at least GNOME 3.14 while the support found there will be shipped as a preview. Missing features like drag 'n' drop and clipboard support are still missing from GNOME's Wayland code, which made them decide another six months of development work is needed. Other GNOME 3.12 features are mentioned on the GNOME Wiki."

77 comments

  1. What ???????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I want Wayland support. And I want it NOW!

    1. Re:What ???????? by kthreadd · · Score: 2

      Patches are welcome. =)

    2. Re:What ???????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think I need to go to the toilet now and have a dump.

    3. Re: What ???????? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So sorrow

  2. This is surprising by jandrese · · Score: 2, Funny

    Here I was thinking they were going to shove it in there all half baked and kind of broken like most of the other things Gnome 3 has replaced. I hope this isn't because Wayland is that bad, but rather because the Gnome team has learned some lessons about removing the stuff that works and putting in stuff that is not ready for prime time yet.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:This is surprising by MrEricSir · · Score: 4, Funny

      I hope this isn't because Wayland is that bad, but rather because the Gnome team has learned some lessons about removing the stuff that works and putting in stuff that is not ready for prime time yet.

      At the risk of stating the obvious, prepare to have your hopes crushed.

      --
      There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
    2. Re:This is surprising by joaommp · · Score: 2

      I don't believe that by adding Wayland support they were going to - at least immediately - remove X support... But I was rather anxious to see Wayland support in it and test it in our distro.

      On a different off-topic matter, it would be fun if they named it Wayland & Yutani, instead of Wayland & Weston.

      --
      Onda Technology Institute
    3. Re:This is surprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wayland really is that bad. GNOME are now scrambling to implement things like drag'n'drop and clipboard precisely because Wayland doesn't support them like X did.

      This will only result in incompatible implementations in GNOME and KDE, unless you just carry on using X of course.

      It is kind of amusing watching GNOME get shafted because their upstream decided to stop supporting something though.

  3. Bad options for users by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I thought Gnome was going to remove support for drag-n-drop and clipboard anyway. Those things are options in all other OSes, right? And they are too complicated and nobody uses them, right?

    1. Re:Bad options for users by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I heard Gnome was going to remove the panel, wallpapers, and pretty much everything. They are going to have just one extra large button in the middle of the desktop with the label "NO" on it.. Some Gnome developers think that is going to be too confusing for the users so they want to get rid of the button, too.

  4. No matter, GNOME, no thank you by fnj · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't care what happens with GNOME at this point. I will be using either KDE or Xfce. I have been GNOME free for long enough to know that I am not going back. I evaluated Xfce long enough to know that it is quite satisfactory, if not as perfect as GNOME2 was. Now I have been on KDE for five weeks. I have issues with the control over icon placement on desktop and taskbar, and the putrid weather applet - otherwise, absolutely no issues whatever.

    I'm afraid the MATE DE is not yet good enough to live with. I evaluated it; it is very promising; I support the effort, but it's no replacement for GNOME2 yet. I'm not sure anything will ever be, but that's life. No car is anywhere near as perfect as the glorious 1978-1982 Audi 5000 either, and nothing has come along to equal the late Icom IC-R75.

    1. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Daniel+Hoffmann · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You should give cinnamon a try, it is quite good.

    2. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've found that xfce as a window manager has a lot of annoying flaws, but I like their panel system and other bits and pieces.

      I'm very happy running xfce with openbox doing the window managing though. The two play really well together.

      I've never really liked gnome, but I could live with gnome 2 as a default on workstations because despite the lack of flexibility it did actually let you do most things in some kind of way. Newer versions of gnome are just broken.

      On the subject, one increasing trend I'm seeing with gnome is how tightly they are coupling everything. It's becoming harder to just run one piece of gnome software without having the full "gnome stack" running. Example: gnome-screensaver relies on gnome-session for monitoring idle time. KDE does the same thing to some extend, but for the most part KDE programs can still be run by themselves.

    3. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by joaommp · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I really don't get all this hate against Gnome 3. It's quite different, for sure and maybe it messes up someone's workflow, but at some point it will always be impossible to evolve without messing up at least some of the workflow and without making some people get used to different paradigms. I adapted quite well to Gnome 3 and am a happy Gnome 3 user. The new flow actually made me quite more productive.
      Not trying to impose anything on anyone, but most of what I've seen so far borders an exagerated misguided fundamentalist rage and a lot of the comments I've read come from people that claim missing features that are actually part of Gnome 3 - so, maybe they are blidingly judging a book without even looking at its cover?
      I believe many people get legitimately annoyed and frustrated by the changes. I mean, it takes a while to automate a workflow and to get used to something and then sometimes it's back to the begining. But, sorry to disagree, I didn't feel that bad and now I would never go back. I like it quite a lot, to be honest.

      --
      Onda Technology Institute
    4. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by SpzToid · · Score: 1

      I like it a lot too. On both my netbook, notebook, and large double-monitor rig. The first thing I do after I install Ubuntu is install Gnome 3. Also when I do this for other people I turn on to Ubuntu for the first time, it has been a hit with everyone so far.

      Your anecdote may vary from mine. But this is mine. I tried it compared to everything else and I like it.

      --
      You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
    5. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by sensei+moreh · · Score: 1

      I agree - give cinnamon a try

      --
      Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
    6. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Black+Parrot · · Score: 2

      I ditched GNOME for MATE about two weeks ago. A few bugs (e.g., screensaver timer is off), but also fixes things that have been broken in GNOME for years (single left-click on window list to pop something up, vs. right click and pick a menu option).

      Restoring my customizations was surprisingly easy - easier than restoring them after the last few GNOME upgrades.

      No regrets whatsoever.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    7. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

      but at some point it will always be impossible to evolve without messing up at least some of the workflow and without making some people get used to different paradigms

      Why is "evolving" necessary? Some of us want tools, not eye sores^w candy.

      There's no inherent advantage in having a desktop that looks like Windows, a Mac, or a cell phone.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    8. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by ShawnX · · Score: 1

      Putrid weather applet? Whats wrong with it? I know there's bugsm (BBC broke but I have a patch coming to fix this)... but tell me what's wrong otherwise, after all *I* wrote it (not the QML frontend rewrite mind you) but the rest of it. I have plans to make further changes when I get some time.

      --
      Everyone wants a Tux in their life.
    9. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Kremmy · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure part of the problem is that some people honestly don't realize that Ubuntu's default interface isn't Gnome 3. I was pleasantly surprised at how slick and functional Gnome 3 actually was, but this Unity crap...

    10. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Side note: Check the API for yr.no ( http://om.yr.no/verdata/free-weather-data/ ). It's a service of the Norwegian meteorological institute, and in a rather nice fit of socialism it's entirely free to use and covers near enough everywhere on earth. As they put it, "As far as we know, this is the world’s largest free weather service".

    11. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I really don't get all this hate against Gnome 3.

      Lets put it this way, Gnome 3 was completely unlike Gnome 2 it removed, moved and changed features without giving the user the option to change these "better" things back to the good old way things where in Gnome 2. Now this would not have been that bad, after all you where not forced to used Gnome 3 - except for Gnome 2 users this was the case, there is no gnome2 or gnome3 prefix for Gnome binaries. Gnome 3 despite being nothing like Gnome 2 was published as a simple update and not the new and incompatible version it was, naturally it broke a lot and frustrated everyone who did not care about the tablet/phone craze. If they hadn't been attempting to push Gnome 3 like crazy there would have been no problem with using a gnome3 prefix allowing Gnome 2 to be maintained by those interested.

      TL;DR: some of us hate Gnome 3 because the Gnome Project tried to shove it down our throats,

    12. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Windwraith · · Score: 1

      Oh? I really want a patch to restore BBC, it gave really accurate weather for my area, and wetter.com not only was making up the weather prediction, it also gives multiple connection problems.
      Can I have that patch to apply it locally, or is it still a WIP?
      I love the weather app when it's not using wetter.com, it's been there in my system tray ever since it was possible to add it to the system tray. Can't wait to have it back with accurate predictions!

    13. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Sri+Ramkrishna · · Score: 1

      It's because some of them believe that a computer is an extension of themselves and so they like to make the computer work to their workflow or whatever. So, GNOME 3 doesn't really do that you have to adopt to the workflow that it is optimized for. If you of that mindset then, yes, indeed it will be hard to get used to GNOME 3. That doesn't make GNOME 3 bad or anything, but that's why you get these comments. But I would say that there should be one projects that breaks the status quo and lead with new ideas instead of trying to conform to just technical FOSS people.

    14. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Sri+Ramkrishna · · Score: 1

      Some folks hated GNOME 2 for the same reason. :-) But it evolved and got better.

    15. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by bug1 · · Score: 1

      I really don't get all this hate against Gnome 3

      They designed it to compete with the upcoming windows 8, they didnt want to get left behind (true story).

    16. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by AvitarX · · Score: 2

      Which I assume is why GNOME looks like none of those things.

      Isn't a default GNOME screen completely blank? that's not really eye candy at all.

      Note, I hate GNOME 3, and love a cluttered desktop, but a lot of people get annoyed by desktop clutter.

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
    17. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by fnj · · Score: 1

      Not quite sure what you're on about. I was pretty careful not to put any hate whatsoever into the comment. I'm past anything like that, personally. I didn't (and don't) even recommend that no one else use it, or touch on any pros and cons. All I said is I am done with it. It is irrelevant to me.

    18. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by fnj · · Score: 1

      I think I can describe what was behind my rather rude description. The only reason I mentioned it is that there isn't that much to find fault with in KDE.

      I compare the applet to the GNOME2 weather applet, which to me is perfect.

      GNOME2: everything I care about is right there. Current temperature, wind speed and direction, dew point, whether it is fair or stormy. A nice succinct text forecast that includes expected snow accumulation if relevant. Weather radar. I think that's pretty much it; I haven't seen the thing in six weeks now. So I don't have to click anything at all to see the current temperature, and the rest is all available instantly.

      KDE: it shows nothing at all until I click on it; just a huge yellow ball. When I click, all I see is cryptic numbers. Top line, "Day", "Night", "28" and "1". I assume the first two are for today and the last two are the upcoming two days. So far, so good. Second line, 4 pictographs showing sunny, dark, cloudy, etc. Nothing wrong with that line. Third line: 4 temperature figures. The first two look like today's high and low. The last two seem, forgive me, to be pulled out of someone's ass. I want to think they are the predicted highs for the upcoming two days, but they aren't even close. Last line: 4 more temperature figures. The first two I can't figure out what they are for. The last two seem, lacking insight, seem to be more ass-pulling. They bear no relation to the expected lows of the upcoming two days.

      My phone actually shows me much more right on the main screen, without even running anything discretely.

      P.S., maybe I have the wrong weather applet installed in KDE. It's the one that says "powered by wetter.com". It's kind of hard to say which one I installed, becauser there is no "Help, About". It's the only one I happened to see without maybe going to a lot of trouble.

    19. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is Cinnamon in Debian testing/Jessie yet? When it lands there, userbase will explode. Quite a few of use are reluctant to use binary installation source from anything but the OS vendor. Compiling and maintaining a full desktop from sources is a bit slow, especially on a netbook.

    20. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I prefer nutmeg.

    21. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by joaommp · · Score: 1

      Not accusing you of hating Gnome 3, your comment just reminded me of that.

      --
      Onda Technology Institute
    22. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I really don't get all this hate against Gnome 3

      One data point for you (if you care at all): Attitude.

      To me, they convey the message "You don't exist". I got the message and left ship.

    23. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The problem with GNOME Shell and Cinnamon is that they DO eat a lot more battery than Gnome2/MATE or XFCE, for whatever reason (more intensive usage of graphics driver? this is an Intel laptop, so the driver should be good).

      I've run MATE for a long time for that very reason, and now switched to XFCE on Manjaro, simply because the packaging/theme is so good, I don't miss anything from Gnome/MATE anymore. Battery runtime is comparable to XP/Win7, while GNOME3 easily runs one hour less.

    24. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unfortunately it is slow and inefficient (just like Gnome 3 on which it is based).

      It was also a bit unstable, but that was over a year ago, when I tested it last, so YMMV.
      I just mention it, because it's a relatively small dev team, so instability is to be expected.

      I've switched to KDE after years of trying to avoid it. There are still a few small things I think Gnome does better, but on the whole, it's a saner desktop, and much faster as well.

    25. Re:No matter, GNOME, no thank you by Daniel+Hoffmann · · Score: 1

      Well I did not notice any slowdowns on my core i5 laptop, but it does crash somewhat often (once a week, I just run the command to restart cinnamon and comes back to life with all my stuff still open, so no big deal). But someone else mentioned the battery life loss and while I haven't tested against other window managers I did notice my battery draining somewhat fast.

  5. The real reason for the delay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    for i in /usr/bin /usr/sbin ; do
    "${i}" --version
    done

    systemd 208
    +PAM +LIBWRAP +AUDIT +SELINUX +IMA +SYSVINIT +LIBCRYPTSETUP +GCRYPT +ACL +XZ ... ...

    and once it reaches wayland the output says

    wayland 1.10
    not yet depending on systemd

    The real reason!

  6. Better title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Wayland Waylaid by GNOME

  7. WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ????? Crap, I was looking forward to this. Oh well, back to X I suppose. Even though I'm using X right now rather Wayland. This news should have been released on a Monday rather than a Friday, it's got a Monday feeling to it. Dammit.

  8. Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I wasn't really able to understand the __WHY__ of it!

    1. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by X0563511 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Change, because... change!

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    2. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by JVolkman · · Score: 4, Informative

      This video (from 2013) provides good information about the push towards Wayland: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

    3. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      __WHY__

      X is a farcical, bloated mess that sucks. A lot.

      Some X developers (real, credible ones) saw what Apple has accomplished with their high quality compositors and correctly factored display stack and are trying to bring that to open source systems.

    4. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      > Some X developers (real, credible ones) saw what Apple has accomplished with their high quality compositors and correctly factored display stack and are trying to bring that to open source systems.

      Which is what exactly? I've owned Macs and I really don't see the appeal. If anything, Enlightenment blew the whole lot out of the water back in the 90s and made the whole idea of eye candy on the desktop a stale idea.

      Copy Apple? Stop swimming in the Kool-aid.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    5. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by steelfood · · Score: 1

      Oooh, Shiny(tm)!

      --
      "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
    6. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by SargentDU · · Score: 1

      Thanks that was very helpful for me. :)

    7. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 1

      Because of the client/server architecture. This makes absolutely no sense when you are, say, playing a high FPS game. Right now, the hardware rendering of such, including opengl, simply place a proxy window in place of where the hardware overlay will render. This is a terrible hack and shows that the needs of today's desktops aren't met by the design of X.

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    8. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Balinares · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The story so far in a nutshell:

      The Xorg developers got tired of spending their time working around the way X was designed in 1980 (which made sense at the time) to try and make it fit 2010 workloads and hardware.

      They started to think about how to do the stuff that actually needs doing in an efficient manner, while removing the roadblocks they currently have to contend with.

      Turns out that when you take what Xorg actually does nowadays, streamline the fuck out of it, and take away all the needless obstacles, you end up with a pretty straightforward buffer sharing protocol. They called it Wayland and started to work on an implementation.

      And then the countless people in the peanut gallery who obviously know X much better than the X developers beheld the notion and started giving... loud feedback, shall we say. Without ever stepping forward to take over the maintenance of Xorg, mind you.

      TL;DR: Xorg developers make what they concluded is the soundest technical choice. People on the Internet lose their shit. Business as usual.

      --

      -- B.
      This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
    9. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Kremmy · · Score: 1

      Hopefully it'll actually work. The big important part with regard to the Apple bit is that Apple's fancy new display technology didn't interfere with being able to utilize Apple's clunky old display technology. Maybe it's something that could be as simple as Wayland-native Xnest, but any solution that doesn't keep the ability to integrate with current system functionality isn't a solution. Just like systemd, it's going to take quite a bit more work before these things are feature complete and capable of replacing the systems that they are meant to replace.

    10. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      What about tomorrow's desktops?

    11. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 1

      You'd have to fathom what it is going to be. When X was engineered they couldn't foresee that we would NEED local hardware overlays to interact with the workspace, and I'm not really sure anyone could. But whatever I can think of right now, wayland is the architecture to handle it

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    12. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      Enlightenment was nice, but it wasn't perfectly smooth. Wayland, by having things render more directly, is supposed to fix this (like Windows Vista, and OS X have). There's a reason why Enlightenment is on the forefront of adopting Wayland.

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
    13. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      I find the best approach in ANY OS is to avoid the obvious crap. Avoid the brand that performs the worst in the industry. Avoid the brand that has the worst drivers.

      Good hardware and a well supported driver is 100x more effective than any attempt to pretend Apple is doing things the right way.

      This Wayland nonsense is essentially trying to flush all that and set thing back to the 90s (in multiple ways).

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    14. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      And then the countless people in the peanut gallery who obviously know X much better than the X developers beheld the notion and started giving... loud feedback, shall we say.

      You're right! I don't actually need remote windowing, I'm glad that's cleared up.

      Sarcasm aside, the Wayland folks have also had their own FUD and deceptiveness which means any hostility has been bolstered by a healthy dose of suspicion.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    15. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by akozakie · · Score: 1

      100% true. Because I spend most of my time on Linux playing high FPS games and doing other things in 3D. And X over network is simply an outdated concept noone needs.

      Oh, wait...

      Remote X is one of the things I find best in Linux. No cludges, no tricks - the UI is simply rendered remotely and one of the windows on my desktop is actually for an app running somewhere else. Nothing in the app to support this. No special tools in the system. Just basic X functionality. Cool! On the other hand 3D applications are mostly eyecandy for this platform. Something to play with while something else is doing the stuff you need.

      Wayland is actually a great idea if Linux is ever going to be a serious gaming platform (and for several other use cases). As a separate project it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of problems though:
      - will distros carry both?
      - will X be sufficiently supported when Wayland becomes mainstream?
      - what about drivers?
      - what about compatibility (both X on new hardware and old hardware and new versions of applications)?
      The biggest problem is that the windowing system (not DE, the actual G in GUI) is a bit like init, system loader, package management, etc. - a bit hard to support more than one in the same distro (although it would certainly be possible). Meaning that Wayland might make X obsolete in too many eyes and... dead. Which means that all the missing functionality will be lost forever. Either that, or a painful split of the Linux ecosystem. In the second case, look for me in the dinosaur's garden. There are things in X I use that are intentionally not there in Wayland and nothing of value as tradeoff.

      And Wayland support in any useful DE (I don't consider GNOME 3 one, but that's subjective) would be a Good Thing, if the fear that it will become the only supported option wasn't there.

    16. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by biojayc · · Score: 2

      Please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... And then shut up about how Wayland is crap. Seriously. The people that wrote X and maintain it say that X is crap and are working on Wayland... X is nonsensical and is the reason that linux UIs struggle to not suck. Wayland will bring things FORWARD not backward.

    17. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      You're right! I don't actually need remote windowing, I'm glad that's cleared up.

      And a perfect example of a peanut gallery comment right there. Somehow people think just because a remote window isn't defined in the underlying display protocol it won't work. That would be news to Microsoft, Citrix, VNC and pretty much everyone except for the "Coalition of Wayland Is Bad" who seem to believe that everything must be defined in the display protocol or else it won't exist.

      Now the actual reality is that with Wayland the client now has the choice to implement VNC, RDP, whateverthefucktheywant, without being subjected to a 1980s era network protocol that doesn't even support such advanced technologies like data compression.

      Oh and Weston has a very early alpha example implementing RDP to do remote windowing but don't let that stop your uninformed comments, and I really mean VERY uninformed given how there was even a Slashdot story about it.

    18. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Uecker · · Score: 1

      I like the X protocol, one has to use XCB though, to see that it is really nice and well designed. What people call bloat is actually some code needed for backwards compatibility. There is really no bloat in terms of memory or cpu use. DRI3 will bring efficient buffer sharing for local clients similar to Wayland while still maintaining compatibility. Not that I care about these optimizations - I would prefer the Intel guys fix their drivers so that I don't have rendering bugs all the time on my notebook. (The real motivation for all this buffer sharing optimizations does not seem to be performance improvements anyway, but power usage on mobile devices.)

      And yes, I also like to have network transparency.

      The thing is, a window system is not only about sharing buffers. Otherwise, Wayland would have been finished 5 years ago or so. Do you know what they are doing in all these years? They re-implement all the other stuff, which X already does. You know cut&paste, drag'n'drop, minimizing/maximizing, RandR... But now we have another incompatible API. Sigh.

    19. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      Remote X is one of the things I find best in Linux. No cludges, no tricks - the UI is simply rendered remotely and one of the windows on my desktop is actually for an app running somewhere else. Nothing in the app to support this. No special tools in the system. Just basic X functionality. Cool! On the other hand 3D applications are mostly eyecandy for this platform. Something to play with while something else is doing the stuff you need.

      This is sad. I guess I should back to Windows then? What about us desktop users who don't want a gaming console + TV or whatever. Yes I want to play high fps FPS games and they have to work right, with non buggy drivers. I would even like being able to enable anti-aliasing but that's not a priority for people who develop open source drivers, hell there's not even a GUI.

      On the other if I go back to Windows I'll still be able to run an X server and have a remote app show up, nothing special needed.

    20. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Balinares · · Score: 2

      Hi! Thank you for taking the time to reply.

      I don't personally know the X protocol well enough to comment either way; I can only report on the opinion professed by the X developers themselves.

      Here is what I understand are the answers to the points you raise. You'll probably want to check out the talks by Daniel Stone (core Xorg developer) that have been linked elsewhere in the thread, in case I missed something.

      Essentially, their opinion is that the X protocol is unsuited to what computers do nowadays. From what I understand, the only task that X11 still performs in current graphic stacks is IPC for the actual rendering extensions, and sadly, IPC is something it's very poor at.

      Core X11 is network-transparent by design, but rendering is done through non-core, non-network transparent extensions nowadays. This appears to be a common misunderstanding about the meaning of network-transparent; remote display of application does in fact not require network-transparency because transparency means a lot more than just "remote capable". And Wayland as a protocol is already as remote capable as Xorg because Xorg was already filling buffers remotely and feeding that into SSH connections.

      So if you want network-transparency, you'll have to disable all those rendering extensions in your Xorg configuration. But, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe what you really want, is to fire up apps remotely and have them display locally, right? And this has already been implemented in the reference Wayland compositor.

      Until then, you will probably not miss the loss of network-transparency because you already lost it in current Xorg servers. I think that this, there, is the number one misunderstanding about both Xorg and Wayland.

      You are correct about a window system being more than just about sharing buffers. All the things you mention are being redesigned as part of Wayland with the purpose of fixing issues that the X developers claim were unsolvable with X. (Don't take my word for it, though. Check out those talks.)

      So in essence, the X developers think that Wayland stacks will be better than Xorg stacks at everything that Xorg does. Including remoting.

      I do actually have one reservation about that general claim, and interestingly, it's one that I haven't seen come up from the aforementioned peanut gallery. But time will tell.

      But until then, the X developers think that designing a new API from scratch is more straightforward than monkeypatching the old one into doing the same things. If you sincerely think they are wrong, maybe you'll want to step forward and take over the maintenance of Xorg? I'm sure some people out there would be grateful.

      I, for one, am going to trust that they know what they are doing, but you may feel otherwise about that, and that's fine. There's just a "put up or shut up" line there that people who share your opinion seem unwilling to cross, and I think that's worth pointing out.

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    21. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microsoft's RDP is based on Citrix and they both integrate into the low level windowing functions, which is why they work.

      VNC on the other hand doesn't - it has to rely on screen scraping, which is why it never works properly.

      Nobody uses Weston so the fact it has RDP support is dick all use to anyone using GNOME or KDE.

    22. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Then after Wayland developers produced their streamlined display server it turned out it didn't implement half the things real desktops need, causing the GNOME Wayland support to be delayed for another 6 months while the developers frantically try to reimplement 34 years of code.

    23. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Balinares · · Score: 1

      Hi! I would have liked to thank you for taking the time to reply, but I find it difficult to do sincerely, because your comment adds nothing to the discussion, and even detracts from it.

      You appear to be trying to imply, with some aggressiveness, that Wayland precludes remoting.

      You could have expressed this concern as an interrogation, and I would gladly have tried to share what I understand about the topic.

      Instead, no, a bold, unsubstantiated, sarcastic claim with no room for discussion. This is exactly what I meant about the peanut gallery.

      Likewise, the fact you refer to the issues the Xorg developers themselves -- you are aware that they are who you refer to as 'the Wayland folks', right? -- have claimed to have with X as 'FUD' makes you look like someone who dismisses contrary opinions instead of addressing them. That really doesn't help the discussion either.

      Unless you do, in fact, know better than the Xorg developers themselves. In which case I'm sure you'll step forward to take over the maintenance of Xorg. Won't you?

      As to your implied claim, I addressed it in my reply to Uecker below.

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    24. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      And a perfect example of a peanut gallery comment right there. Somehow people think just because a remote window isn't defined in the underlying display protocol it won't work. That would be news to Microsoft, Citrix, VNC and pretty much everyone except for the "Coalition of Wayland Is Bad" who seem to believe that everything must be defined in the display protocol or else it won't exist.

      Well, this is the stupid FUD of the wayland crew showing its ugly head again.

      No one is stupid enought to claim remote windowing won't work with wayland: a pig can fly given enough thrust. It will, however suck just as hard as all the other pixel-scrapers.

      I guess I should have pedantically said: you're right I don't need good remote windowing.

      On that topic you have Wayland developers claiming stuff like X11 remote windowing is the "worst". This leads old X11 users to believe they are either liars or incompetent (and hence the lack of trust) because having experienced them all over many years, I know for a fact it is a long way from the worst.

      Finally, the best by a conutry mile is NX which is more like X12 and is certainly not a pixel scraper.

      Oh and Weston has a very early alpha example implementing RDP to do remote windowing but don't let that stop your uninformed comments, and I really mean VERY uninformed given how there was even a Slashdot story about it.

      Da fuq? The remote windowing is built into the compositor/windowmanager? I really, really hope someone is making a more sensible architecture than that out there otherwise we're going to wind up with a lot of deficient compositors or a lot of duplicated code.

      The nice thing about X, you see is that it all just works like magic. Any old WM from Unity to XMonad all support remoting with zero effort. If what you've said is true, then there's a nice step backwards there.

      But hey it's the future and not at all legacy.

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      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    25. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Balinares · · Score: 1

      > It will, however suck just as hard as all the other pixel-scrapers.

      You are doing the same thing again.

      You are asserting, without proof, that Wayland remoting will necessarily have to work as a pixel scrapper.

      Wayland is designed to be extensible with regards to supported buffer types. For instance, YUV video buffers were merged into the reference compositor at some point in 2012.

      And remoting specific buffer types can be done vastly more efficiently than with a generic pixel scrapper.

      For instance, in case of a video buffer, the content can be streamed from the remote app to the local YUV buffer as a lossy video stream without impacting the quality of the other, non-video buffers of the application. (In fact, I think I remember something to that extent being demonstrated somewhere, although I can't find the link, so don't quote me on this.)

      Meanwhile, because Xorg's current rendering extensions are not network-transparent, remoting X applications that use those extensions (which will be most of them, these days) does already boil down to filling generic pixel buffers and pushing them down the wire, which works with the approximate efficiency of... a pixel scrapper.

      A Wayland stack should therefore be no worse than a current Xorg stack in most cases, and can theoretically be made to work vastly better. (I don't, however, think we are there yet. See below.)

      If you're using only pure-X11 apps, though, stick with Xorg for the time being. At least until the Wayland stack supports X buffers sufficiently seamlessly.

      > This leads old X11 users to believe they are either liars or incompetent (and hence the lack of trust) because having experienced them all over many years, I know for a fact it is a long way from the worst.

      Only if you are willing to make the mental jump of generalizing the one data point of your own limited experience to the entire world and all the use cases that the Xorg developers have to contend with.

      If you're gonna give that much weight to single data points, well, I'm afraid that my own long experience of X11, which has most recently involved telecommuting over a VPN and having to use tools like x11vnc and xpra because Xorg remoting on its own works too poorly, neutralizes your own single data point, and we're back to square one. :)

      Unless, of course, you are the sort of person who thinks that their own personal experience constitutes the One Overriding Truth, in which case I don't think there is anything whatsoever to be gained for either of us in this discussion.

      > The remote windowing is built into the compositor/windowmanager? I really, really hope someone is making a more sensible architecture than that out there

      You appear to think yourself an authority on sensible architectures, so I would suggest you prove it with some actual design and implementation. Otherwise, I hope you will forgive me if I don't trust you nearly as much as I do the guys who are doing the actual work based on actual experience with actual issues. :)

      That said:

      > otherwise we're going to wind up with a lot of deficient compositors or a lot of duplicated code.

      YES.

      While it could be argued that the many composers/WMs on X already constitutes a lot of duplicated code, I DO agree that the Wayland stack is probably going to be somewhat fragmented for a while, at least until the dust settles.

      In practice, I suspect Wayland stacks will end up converging over a shared common ground: probably one display server/composer will emerge as the de facto standard, like Xorg has become the de facto standard of X11 display servers; or Weston itself will evolve into a set of libraries that display servers/composers will be built upon.

      But this is only a possible future, and until then, I do think that fragmentation and mismatched composer capabilities is the one big issue with the Wayland budding ecosystem.

      Time will tell how big an issue it turns out to be in p

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    26. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Balinares · · Score: 1

      > Nobody uses Weston so the fact it has RDP support is dick all use to anyone using GNOME or KDE.

      Ding ding ding. This, here, is what I think is the main problem with the Wayland ecosystem as it currently exists.

      As things currently stand, the Wayland protocol is designed to give compositors a lot of flexibility in what kind of buffers they support, with what capabilities.

      The drawback is fragmentation.

      So okay, the Unix world at large is not a newcomer to fragmentation issues. But it's still a problem that will have to be addressed.

      As I said in another comment, I think that things will probably converge on the common ground of either a de facto standard compositor, or a set of common libraries. Wayland itself will probably ship with a generic, non-optimized implementation for common capabilities like remoting.

      But until then, it is an issue, and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge it.

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    27. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Uecker · · Score: 2

      Hi, I have to catch a flight. No time to discuss this now. But somehow you think the Wayland developers are "the X developers", who gave up on X. Some Wayland developers are also X developers would be more accurate. And there are other X developers who don't work on Wayland. And even the Wayland developers do not really claim that X is unsuitable for a modern desktops. Just check the Wayland FAQ: it spells out pretty explicitely that you could do everything Wayland does also within X. They just want to get rid of old code, which is currently needed for backwards compatibility. The whole point is Wayland is to break compatibility to get rid of this maintainance burden in the long run. This - IMHO - is stupid. But I guess it depends on how much you value backwards compatibility.

    28. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Balinares · · Score: 2

      Hi,

      Thank you for the additional details. You are right -- I meant to make it clear that the Wayland design was thought up by people with some serious experience of the internals and limitations of X, and not a competing team of newcomers, as appears to be assumed all too often. But yes, things aren't as simple as I made them look and there is only a partial overlap between the Wayland devs and the Xorgs devs. Thank you for the correction.

      I also agree that Wayland is largely about canning the legacy in order to make current and future needs easier to tackle.

      I don't agree with your opinion of the move as a technical choice, though, for three reasons.

      1/ Taking X out of the rendering loop does not mean dropping X altogether. It just means that future X servers, when and where they are still needed, will run on top of Wayland. It does deprecate X as the default API, yes. But that's not remotely the same as breaking compatibility.

      2/ The comments that Daniel Stone (core Xorg and Wayland dev) made in that oft linked video aren't in agreement with the idea that everything Wayland does can be done on top of X, let alone done well. In his talk, DS mentions e.g. issues with input management when one window wants to grab every input that can't be solved in X.

      3/ As a more general philosophical principle, the world moves and everything changes. Everything has a shelf life, up to the universe itself, and there is a point where resisting change for the sake of keeping past things going becomes harmful. And this is the actual reason I've been so active in this thread. Not just because I've got a pretty good hunch that once the dust settles Wayland will largely work better than X. But because I think that we, Slashdotters, Linux users, geeks and nerds, are becoming fearful of change, and that's not a good thing. This, here, is an entire new toy and it opens entire new possibilities! It may break shit and it may be awesome and it will probably be a bit of both. Let's freaking check out the code and play with it! Is this not exactly what we should be about? :)

      Have a safe flight, and thank you for the constructive reply!

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    29. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by Uecker · · Score: 1

      But they had the fathom to make a nice and extendable protocol. For example, when people figured out 10 years ago that the old rendering model is not the most approbriate, the Xrender extension was created. The Wayland FAQ acknowledges that you can do everything Wayland does by extending X (and it seems this is what the DRI3 extension is about). The only point of Wayland - and this is openlly admitted in their FAQ - is to get rid of old code by breaking compatibility in the long run. I do not agree with this direction.

    30. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      On that topic you have Wayland developers claiming stuff like X11 remote windowing is the "worst". This leads old X11 users to believe they are either liars or incompetent (and hence the lack of trust) because having experienced them all over many years, I know for a fact it is a long way from the worst.

      I think you've touched on something there. "Old" that's a good term there. X *WAS* the fastest window manager of it's time over the network. For many years it had the best latency and speed, you know back in the old days when X considered of a client telling the display server to draw primitives, it was really fast and worked very well over the network. Unfortunately that system is not compatible with any modern usage of a GUI and that's not how it's done anymore. X11 now pixel scrapes, and sends the data over the network. It doesn't support compression making it slower than VNC which is even slower than RDP. All current implementations of remote X are painful enough that I go out of my way looking for alternatives.

      So there's your datapoint vs mine. I run remote X, but I don't use X's method of doing it because it flat out sucked compared to pretty much every implementation of VNC / RDP I've tried. Sorry but you sound like you're on an angry rant and I'm likely to trust the Wayland developers on this, you know, the same guys who worked on and maintained X, i.e. the people who actually know about this stuff?

    31. Re:Could somebody explain wayland, please? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      Instead, no, a bold, unsubstantiated, sarcastic claim with no room for discussion. This is exactly what I meant about the peanut gallery.

      Apologies, now I have given a more detailed reply to someone else.

      Basically, the best remoting by far is NX which has it at protocol level. Wayland is a pixel buffer level protocol. Basically that precludes anything better than VNC, which sucks.

      Likewise, the fact you refer to the issues the Xorg developers themselves -- you are aware that they are who you refer to as 'the Wayland folks', right? -- have claimed to have with X as 'FUD' makes you look like someone who dismisses contrary opinions instead of addressing them. That really doesn't help the discussion either.

      I know they're X11 developers (maintainers would be a better word, the developers have long one) and that moves the claims they make from ignorance to FUD because there's no way they could be ignorance.

      Examples: X11 is the worst remote desktop in existence.

      Example (from Keith Packard) and very specific about the bad design of X: Atoms are bad because you have to incur a round trip per atom which adds a hige startup time. Not knowing that the example of how not to do exactly that is in the XCB manual is somewhat unlikely. A person of his stature not knowing XInternAtom is asynchronus is unlikely, hence FUD.

      Example: Lots of claims about how wayland will magically stop tearing. I've yet to see a coherent explanation as to how Wayland is supposed to solve the problem of synchronising 2 monitors running at different speeds without tearing. So far I'm expected to beliece Wayland solves this like magic.

      And other stupidities from the developers:

      Bear in mind these are the X11 *maintainers* who do user hostile thing such as removing the keystroke for killing an active grab because bad grabs are only caused by buggy applications and "shouldn't happen". They also decided to make weston have client side decorations, that's a whole pile of crappyness if you get buggy applications. In the real world those do exist.

      Basically, the wayland devs are intentionally misrepresenting things. That's FUD. Is it any wonder they're greeted with such hostility?

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  9. Gnome 3.12 still supports Wayland by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1

    Gnome 3.12 still supports Wayland, for any distro that wants to ship it that way. It's just that Wayland is not the default for Gnome 3.12. This probably speaks more to the distros ability to have Wayland working smoothly than Gnome 3.12 using Wayland.

  10. RE: Bad options for users (100, Funny) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nah, first they support it and it will work quite well. Then they remove it and brand it as a new feature ("NEW: GNOME without clipboard!"). Next, due to user complaints, some dude developer comes with an alternative that requires 3 mouse gestures, 1 keyboard press and 2 animations to complete, but it doesn't work on multi-monitor setups. Finally it works but it's suddenly slow as fuck and in the meantime other things are broken and/or removed. In following GNOME releases they keep changing it in subtle ways ("a new theme!") that nobody cares about.

      - A GNOME user.

  11. Missing feature like DND by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    Are you guys serious? Calling that a feature?
    It's a sine qua non (wiki there to help you) you fraudulent wannabees!

  12. In other words... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wayland waylaid; now way late.

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  13. Give GNOME some credit and trust them by tyson3783 · · Score: 1, Troll

    I hope people stop harping on the GNOME team, at this point it should be clear to some end users that the gnome-shell interface has come together. 3.8 and 3.10 are beautiful once you install extensions the act of which could not be easier and browsing new extensions is kind of fun. The dev team has had terrible communication problems and I get pissed off when they remove stuff like transparency in gnome-terminal, but extensions often replace missing features (compiz wobble for example). Over time my Arch linux installs have become something I can show my friends and be proud of, this is in no small part thanks to GNOME developers. I love GNOME and I wish more distros were able to experience bleeding edge gnome-shell, hopefully as time goes on they will. And when Debian stable users get moved to 3.8 and their transparent shell goes away hopefully someone like me will be there to tell them to grab the xcfe4-terminal and trust the developers decision to deprecate what they claim was unmaintainable code.

    1. Re:Give GNOME some credit and trust them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Fuck that!

      I was a GNOME user since before GTK+2 existed. I used GNOME2 for its entire life and it was exactly what I needed from a desktop environment.

      Then the GNOME team got hijacked by a bunch of UI people obsessed with bringing the tablet braindamage to the desktop. Epic fail. Guess what, some of use use their computers to do REAL WORK.

      I switched to a tiling window manager and haven't looked back. I suppose that I can thank the fecal encephalopathy of everyone on the GNOME3 team for helping me make this decision.