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KDE and Canonical Developers Disagree Over Display Server

sfcrazy (1542989) writes "Robert Ancell, a Canonical software engineer, wrote a blog titled 'Why the display server doesn't matter', arguing that: 'Display servers are the component in the display stack that seems to hog a lot of the limelight. I think this is a bit of a mistake, as it’s actually probably the least important component, at least to a user.' KDE developers, who do have long experience with Qt (something Canonical is moving towards for its mobile ambitions), have refuted Bob's claims and said that display server does matter."

202 comments

  1. logic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If they don't matter, why mir?

    1. Re:logic by batkiwi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They're saying that it doesn't matter to an app developer if you're using a middleware framework, as most developers do, because the eventual output on the display will be the same.

      The reasons for introducing mir are performance, ability to run on low footprint devices, and cross device compatability.

      So their point is that X11 vs wayland vs mir vs framebuffer vs blakjsrelhasifdj doesn't matter to a developer using the full QT stack. Their write their app to QT, and then developers on QT write the backend to talk to whatever the end user is using. It's more work for QT/other frameworks, but "should" be "no" more work for an app developer.

    2. Re:logic by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      The reasons for introducing mir are performance, ability to run on low footprint devices, and cross device compatability.

      Jolla would like to know why the need for Mir when they have a Wayland compositor and window manager running on low-end/mid-range mobile devices with excellent (compared to other similar-spec devices) performance.

    3. Re:logic by batkiwi · · Score: 1

      Jolla would like to know why the need for Mir when they have a Wayland compositor and window manager running on low-end/mid-range mobile devices with excellent (compared to other similar-spec devices) performance

      I have no idea, and I don't pretend to. I was pointing out that the +5 rated comment I replied to was not insightful and was missing the point of the original article. It was talking to app developers, not framework/OS/etc developers.

    4. Re:logic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Qt.

      Get it right.

  2. Personal blog by Severus+Snape · · Score: 2, Informative

    NOTHING to do with Canonical at all. Yay for the let's all hate Canonical bandwagon.

    1. Re:Personal blog by sfcrazy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      He is a Canonical developer and its not a post about his family cat.

    2. Re:Personal blog by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And the KDEvelopers write an official response to a non-story blog post, get it posted to Slashdot (probably cost them less than a drink at Starbucks), and generate more attention to the original blog than it would've had before.

      Clearly KDE's crowd is terrified of people actually believing Robert's claim (of the 4 Roberts I have met, none liked the name Bob), and have accidentally Streisand-effected this.

      My stance: I don't trust KDE or Canonical to develop a useful UI, one is too stuck on supporting fringe uses at the cost of any possible performance and the other has shown a hostility toward any user customization. (Ok, for full disclosure, I installed KDE after accidentally upgrading to a 'Unity' Ubuntu build. The system went from ugly to crashing more than Windows ME. LXDEd it later and everything is back to useful.)

    3. Re:Personal blog by Tailhook · · Score: 1, Troll

      NOTHING to do with Canonical at all.

      Yet there is Mark Shuttleworth, replying the same day to this supposedly "personal" blog with:

      It was amazing to me that competitors would take potshots at the fantastic free software work of the Mir team

      But hey... that's Google+, not ubuntu.com or whatever, so that's got nothing to do with Canonical either. Right?

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    4. Re:Personal blog by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 2

      They are terrified, because it would mean more work for them and less advancement of the linux graphics stack. Having three display servers ( Xorg, Wayland, Mir) increases the amount of code paths everything and everyone has to deal with.

      Its not trivial as Robert suggested, and more importantly, it doesn't increase Robert's workload.

      If there is one thing that's really annoying, its someone telling you how easy your really difficult job is. So I understand the frustration apparent in the kde blogs.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    5. Re:Personal blog by houstonbofh · · Score: 1, Insightful

      My stance: I don't trust KDE or Canonical to develop a useful UI, one is too stuck on supporting fringe uses at the cost of any possible performance and the other has shown a hostility toward any user customization. (Ok, for full disclosure, I installed KDE after accidentally upgrading to a 'Unity' Ubuntu build. The system went from ugly to crashing more than Windows ME. LXDEd it later and everything is back to useful.)

      I do not trust any "GUI UI Designer" to develop a useful UI. Why? Because their job depends on constant change, regardless of if it is better or not. Take cars, for example. Can you Imagen what the Unity team or KDE would do to you car? I can bet it would not have a wheel in the middle wipers on the right, turn signals on the left, ignition on the dash on the right, headlights on the dash on the left, and gear selector on the right in the center. (For left had drive) Nor would the peddles be clutch brake gas from left to right... Why? Because leaving something that works well alone does not validate your existence and contribution to the project.

    6. Re:Personal blog by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Plus 1000 Insightful!

      This is exactly the problem with the Linux community - there is too much self-choice and self-validation and developers/companies only develop what they find personally interesting, rather than what actually needs to be done.

    7. Re:Personal blog by geek · · Score: 2

      They are terrified, because it would mean more work for them and less advancement of the linux graphics stack. Having three display servers ( Xorg, Wayland, Mir) increases the amount of code paths everything and everyone has to deal with.

      No it doesn't. No one but Canonical will be supporting Mir and Xorg will go away. Leaving Wayland for the adults. No one besides Canonical gives two shits about Mir and once Wayland is stable enough for primary use people will switch to it faster than they did to systemd.

    8. Re:Personal blog by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      Users, using applications on ubuntu will care when those applications break because of the Mir backend. They'll care. A number of them will probably report that the apps don't work to the application writers, when the real issue is in the MIr support for the toolkits that Ubuntu will have to write. Thus, app developers will have to spend some time trouble shooting the problem.

      This is the argument the KDE guys are advancing. It makes sense to me, but I must admit, I don't know the guts, nuts or bolts of Mir, Wayland, GTK, QT, xorg or the like.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    9. Re:Personal blog by Barsteward · · Score: 1

      well, fuck off to MS or Apple and be told what to do, what to choose, , abandon your right to think for yourself

      --
      "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
    10. Re:Personal blog by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, Kubuntu at least has decided to support Wayland instead of Mir, I'd bet on X/Lubuntu doing the same. Gnome's having all that RH support is obviously focusing on Wayland too.

        The problem lies in Unity, but it's not like it's the only or even the best DE anyways. So, for all I care, it's irrelevant whatever Canonical decides to do. All developers have to do is to focus on the real world solution, not Canonical's pipedream. The already lost the init war, it's just a matter of time to lose the DS war.

  3. Of course it matters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I need to know who to blame when they screw it up again because the open-source management by committee model ensures they end up bloated mockeries of their original design goals.

    1. Re:Of course it matters by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hey! No need to bring systemd into this...

  4. Open source pissing contest! Yay! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think the biggest advantage of open source is we get the entertainment of seeing the pissing contests.

    Gotta love it when Linus cusses out someone on the LKML who crossed him*.

    * - OT, but I love Linus when he does that. I hope it makes some poor butthurt pussy bleed. This world is way too full of overly sensitive pussies and I'm so glad Linus is doing his best to make sure they remove themselves from the gene pool.

    Now go fuck yourself, your family dog, and the gopher hole out back. ;-)

    1. Re:Open source pissing contest! Yay! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Linus doesn't do that as AC.

      Pussy.

    2. Re:Open source pissing contest! Yay! by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      Ever since you started that no-fap pledge, you have been terribly stressed...

    3. Re:Open source pissing contest! Yay! by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Well, you would be a meta-pussy as you also posted that as AC.

  5. Closed source Canonical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Obviously they are supervillains! Open source means no need to burn the witch to prove it's a witch!

    I do like Ubuntu though. No witch burnings today.

  6. no, really? by X0563511 · · Score: 1, Funny

    Interesting how KDE and those responsible for Unity have differing perspectives... who would have thought?

    --
    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...
  7. Re:oh good by Teun · · Score: 1
    Too easy to downmod you.

    From your comment about a shitty UI one can only conclude you have never used KDE.
    Although better graphics would be nice calling them amateurish is rather silly.

    --
    "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
  8. Bollocks by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The display server is hugely important. The fact that the user doesn't know they're using it is irrelevant, because they're using it at all times.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  9. Shh... by GameMaster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You heard the man, it's not important. Now stop talking about it! That way Canonical can more easily save face when they cancel their failed cluster-fuck of a display server and switch back to Wayland...

    --

    Rules of Conduct:
    #1 - The DM is always right.
    #2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
    1. Re:Shh... by squiggleslash · · Score: 2, Insightful

      X.org, not Wayland. Wayland is still under development. Wayland devs must be elated that Mir has made the debate "Wayland vs Mir" rather than "Tried, trusted, works, and feature complete X.org vs Wayland."

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re:Shh... by JDG1980 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      X.org, not Wayland. Wayland is still under development. Wayland devs must be elated that Mir has made the debate "Wayland vs Mir" rather than "Tried, trusted, works, and feature complete X.org vs Wayland."

      X.org is not "feature complete" in any meaningful sense. It is incapable of doing the kind of GPU-accelerated, alpha-blended compositing that is expected on a modern user interface. Sure, you can get around most of this by ignoring all the X11 primitives and using X.org to blit bitmaps for everything, with all the real work done by other toolkits. But in that case, it's those other toolkits doing the heavy lifting, and X.org is just a vestigal wart taking up system resources unnecessarily.

    3. Re:Shh... by jedidiah · · Score: 0, Troll

      > X.org is not "feature complete" in any meaningful sense. It is incapable of doing the kind of GPU-accelerated, alpha-blended compositing

      It's fascinating what the eggheads decide to fixate on. This is really where the problem starts. Instead of focusing on practical features, you're fixating on the most trivial sort of nonsense and eye candy possible. Most normal people ignore that stuff or turn it off completely.

      It's nice that you are finally noticing these things only about 15 years since the Englightement window manager was created but some of us actually have work to do.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    4. Re:Shh... by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 4, Informative

      This is all wrong. X has something called GLX which allows you to do hardware accelerated OpenGL graphics. GLX allows OpenGL commands to be sent over the X protocol connection. X protocol is sent over Unix Domain Sockets when both client and server are on the same system, this uses shared memory so it is very fast, there is no latency of network transparency when X is used locally in this manner. MIT SHM also supports forms of shared memory for transmission of image data. Only when Applications when they are being used over a network, do they need to fall back to send data over TCP/IP. Given this, the benefits of having network transparency are many, but there is no downside because where an application is run locally, it can use the Unix domain sockets, the MIT SHM and DRI.

      X has also had DRI for years which has allowed an X application direct access to video hardware.

      As for support for traditional X graphics primatives, these have no negative impact on the performance of applications which do not use them and use a GLX or DRI channel instead. Its not as if hardware accelerated DRI commands have to pass through XDrawCircle, so the existance of XDrawCircle does not impact a DRI operation in any significant way. The amount of memory that this code consumes is insignificant, especially when compared to the amount used by Firefox. Maybe back in 1984 a few kilobytes was a lot of RAM, that is when many of these misconceptions started, but the fact is, these issues were generally found with any GUI that would run on 1980s hardware. People are just mindlessly repeating some myth started in the 1980s which has little relevance today. Today, X uses far less memory than Windows 8 does and the traditional graphics commands consume an insignificant amount that is not worth being worried about, and which is needed to support the multitude of X applications that still use them.

    5. Re:Shh... by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Today, X uses far less memory than Windows 8

      Nice, you just compared a single process on one OS to the entire OS and its subprocesses of another. Totally fair.

      How about you compare X to the Win32 Desktop Window Manager instead? Which is a lot closer, though still not exact since Windows has this mentality that GUI in the kernel is a good idea.

      My point however is that your comparison is not really a comparison.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    6. Re:Shh... by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 2

      I also forgot to mention X has had the X Composition Extension and X Render Extension which have allowed for alpha blending operations for quite some time. Your information is a bit out of date.

    7. Re:Shh... by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 1

      You did mention hardware accelerated compositing, and I wanted to clarify that X protocols can indeed support this, it is mainly internal improvements in the X server that may be needed to support them. You dont really need an entirely new windowing system for this.

    8. Re:Shh... by gizmo2199 · · Score: 1

      Apropos, does Wayland support hardware accel: vdpau, vaapi? No point in having a newish gpu if you can't use those.

      --
      This Sig does not Exist.
    9. Re:Shh... by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Also tear-free video seems to be one god awfully big workaround for limitations in X. The stated goal of Wayland was a system in which "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker." I doubt he'd say that if X had no tearing lag, redrawing or flicker which seems like rather huge deficiencies to me.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    10. Re:Shh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wayland is also not feature complete, and neither is Mir. We should be fixing one of them instead of arguing over who's fault it is.

    11. Re:Shh... by caseih · · Score: 1

      Think you need to watch Daniel Stone's presentation on why X11, well, sucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      Long story, X11 has been hacked to add things like GLX and composite, and these things go around the X protocol essentially. X is pretty much a complicated and poorly-working IPC nowadays. Yet even if you removed all the cruft, you'd be left with the fact that X makes a very poor IPC mechanism. Also with GLX and compositing, X is no longer network transparent. It's network-capable, but it's not transparent in the same way it used to be with X primitives crossing the wire. In most cases, especially with compositing, the X is network-transparent in the same way VLC is. It's simply sending graphics over the wire. And there are better ways to do it than how X does it. Heck, VLC is better (don't believe me? try Xvncserver... it's quite fast since it knows what to redraw over VLC). RDP is a whole lot better also. And X's asynchronous nature means we still have tearing and stuttering after all these years.

      Really, once window remoting is in Wayland, X will be completely unnecessary.

    12. Re:Shh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      X.org, not Wayland. Wayland is still under development. Wayland devs must be elated that Mir has made the debate "Wayland vs Mir" rather than "Tried, trusted, works, and feature complete X.org vs Wayland."

      X cannot do VSYNC. The end.

      Seriously, that is a total failure condition. Cannot play video without screen tearing, cannot prevent flickering during repaint, cannot render 3D without screen tearing. X is an embarrassment.

    13. Re:Shh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I use emacs most of the time, and I only switch off compositing when it sucks.

      It's quite nice to have a pictorial view of app switching as well as text.

    14. Re:Shh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I know someone else already posted this. But seriously, if you have the time, watch this video.

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

      1. It's a gigantic project that all of the maintainers of it hate.
      2. It flickers and flashes and tears making them all look like amateurs, which is not acceptable in 2014.
      3. Most of its code isn't even used anymore for any of its intended purposes.
      4. X is responsible for a large portion of application startup time.
      5. X can't even launch a screensaver while you have a menu open, and this cannot be fixed without breaking X.

    15. Re:Shh... by sjames · · Score: 1

      I tunnel over ssh to a remote server that runs an X application which pops open a window on my workstation that is indistinguishable from any other window on my desktop. That includes cut/paste just working. Try that with any of the alternatives you suggested. Now try throwing Xpra into the mix. Good luck with that.

      Yes, perhaps once Wayland quits hand waving and spending all it's time talking about how it's going to cram itself down everyone's throat, it might get some traction.

    16. Re:Shh... by sjames · · Score: 1

      Except it doesn't really come up in X except under conditions Wayland doesn't even handle. It's easy to design a car that never has a fatal crash, just leave out the wheels and engine.

    17. Re:Shh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You should be able to run a rootless X server on top of wayland that could catch and display X sessions forwarded over ssh. Fowarding from a wayland native application won't happen because wayland intentionally avoids the sorts of complications neccessary to bolt on a protocol like that. Thankfully advances are being make towards fowarding applications at the toolkit level, or it could potentially be added at the level of the window manager. (weston, kdewin, E19). There are very good reasons on modern hardware to abondoned the client-server model in favor of simple direct rendering and GL streams.

    18. Re:Shh... by sjames · · Score: 1

      So you're saying the solution is to run X? I agree. Not sure why, given that I will have X running at all times, I would want to bother with Wayland.

      Currently, I don't have to care what toolkit was used and I don't have to run a display server on a machine that doesn't have a monitor and may not even have a video card at all (why would it, it's racked in a lights out facility). I just ssh with X11 forwarding turned on and it just works. Unless or until Wayland can do that with the same complete lack of muss and fuss, it is inferior and not suitable for purpose.

      Me to auto designer: I don't care how complicated you believe engines to be. I will not 'drive' a peddle car.

    19. Re:Shh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not having to run X as root gives a lot of advantages.

      Appearently Weston can go on top of FB_DEV or a headless backent and do RDP at the moment. Weston is being integrated with an RDP compositor so that eventually it should be able to throw a single windows across the net. You'll be able to keep X for quite a while still, but it seems silly to cling to it on platforms that'll never use the feautre. For most use cases X is the rube-goldberb car. At this point we've already killed 90% of the functionality of the X server moving it into the kernel, system libraries, or the toolkits. X fowarding is a happy accident of a model that is entirely innapropriate for the demands fo modern graphics. It's a corner case used by people who are perfectly capable of dealing with a little muss and fuss, unless you are willing to actively develop and maintain X, which will be a lot of muss and fuss.

    20. Re:Shh... by sjames · · Score: 1

      X can run on top of a framebuffer as well. It only runs as root because it's used for logins, but it doesn't actually have to.

      A seriously modified RDP might be fine, but I have no desire to run a compositor on my server that doesn't even have video capability.

      Remote X is hardly an accident, it was part of the original design, very much on purpose. It is nothing like a corner case. It is common enough that the unrelated ssh project saw fit to make it work even easier and more securely.

      I would be fine with a cleaned up X or some successor that properly supports remote operation over the network (even Wayland if the developers see the light). Lack of that capability is an absolute dealbreaker. There's no point trying to talk me out of it.

    21. Re:Shh... by caseih · · Score: 1

      You're misreading what I said. Wayland absolutely is going to have to have to have remoting capabilities to gain traction. And note I said, "per-window" remoting. In other words the forwarding you talk about will be coming in Wayland. It's not just desktop in a window we're talking about.

      And you should do a few benchmarks. X11 over SSH is horrible slow. A lot of round-trips to the server, etc. And really, under the hood, it's just a sucky version of VNC (got that spelt right finally) behind each window you pull across via ssh. Almost all of what you see is simply bitmaps being passed over the wire. But it's worse than that. Because of the nature of the X server and it's IPC, there are a lot of round trips to the server before the bitmap is even pushed across, and a lot of dupicated redrawing, etc. This makes any modern X11 app virtually useless over ssh on anything slower than a LAN.

      There's nothing in RDP that restricts you to a desktop in a window. It can and does do individual windows and apps, if the server part supports it. And guess what, it's way faster than X11 tunneled. And it can pass files and printers too.

      Of course Wayland doesn't define the remoting method. Something even better could be created.

      Seriously watch that video of Daniel Stone.

    22. Re:Shh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "but I have no desire to run a compositor on my server that doesn't even have video capability" Why? IF your going to throw pixels over the wire you need a buffers to place them in first. Why not have the butter provided by something that knows something about compositing? All that compositor would do is compress seperate layers or buffer objects into a single window frame to be sent over the wire, instead of having to send each buffer over the wire.

    23. Re:Shh... by sjames · · Score: 1

      And be installed on the server

    24. Re:Shh... by sjames · · Score: 1

      Finally found time to watch. I had seen bits before. It looks like I need to clarify a few things.

      I agree that X needs a serious re-do. I never argued otherwise. I see no problem with the idea that the client renders it's own window content. Fine and dandy. What I disagree with is the insistence on not defining a network protocol into the foundation of the design. Given a choice between shared memory and a network protocol that can run over a unix socket, I'll take the latter. SHMEM was always a dirty hack from the bad old days when you could just about feel every cycle. Modern kernels largely implement the socket abstraction using shared memory anyway, so all you do by not using it is throw away information that could make the remote networking work better.

      As a side note, from a security perspective, shared memory is a nightmare for input validation compared to data streams.

      The kicker is that as bad as the X protocol is (and it is), it is adequate for many purposes. It exists and it works. It could work better. I had really hoped when Wayland/Y was being kicked around that it would be that.

      The remote capability is too important to relegate to afterthought. It's way too easy to foreclose optimal remote protocol choices that way.

      Part of the problem is PR. Too many advocates have been busily shooting Wayland in both feet by completely dismissing even the utility of remote capability, even going so far as to claim X isn't remote capable at all and so there's no sense in Wayland having the capability. Too many people playing semantic games. I'll bet that practically everyone actually understands that when people say network transparent, they mean from the end user's perspective, not that SHMEM works over remote. Hold the talk of Wayland replacing everything until a complete reference implementation (with remote capability) is up and running.

      So, fully agreed that X needs a big revision and that keeping compatibility with some static compiled Motif app from the mid '90s is a non-starter (except in the form of some sort of XinWayland translator). I'm just not comfortable with a lot of hand waving and claims contrary to observation surrounding such a fundamental part of any useful desktop OS. I don't find X over the open internet at all useless. I use it routinely over a residential cablemodem connection. Yes, it would be next to useless over dialup or satellite.

      As for VNC, it is actually terribly inefficient from the CPU standpoint. It has to take a series of 'samples' of the rendered output, detect the changes itself, and then apply compression and send in the form of updates (and God help you if you don't have a truecolor display, but that's largely a problem of the past.). If it could talk directly with the client sending region-updates, it could manage much better. Because it has no concept of transactions, it is far from frame perfect if even a single packet gets delayed or lost on the network. Ideally it would double buffer and only flip buffers upon a commit message. The server side would know when to send the commit messages if it was better coupled with the app. Alternatively, where that isn't called for, a stream protocol would at least allow the changes to be done in order and atomically.

  10. NIH forever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The NIH-ness and "let's completely rewrite something for fun" mentality spawned this display server debacle, plus the wonderful systemd/upstart mess. How about we follow the unix's KISS principle, and the traditional modularity and openness it gave us.

    - cynical FreeBSD user

    1. Re:NIH forever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh yeah, everything was completely good enough before those Linux upstarts came along. That's why all the free BSD operating systems are slavishly copying Linux's 3d rendering stack, and attempting to develop the features required to support Weston and modern desktop environments.

  11. How are these things related? by rafjaimes · · Score: 1

    Qt is a widget toolbox used for designing UIs. What does this have to do with a display server? As far as I know, display servers are X and Wayland.

    1. Re:How are these things related? by armanox · · Score: 1

      Well, there is also SurfaceFlinger and Quartz...

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    2. Re:How are these things related? by DarkOx · · Score: 2

      Because the tool boxes (QT, GTK, and others) don't provide a complete abstraction layer, at least not when your project gets to the point of doing anything 'fancy' if all your application does is display some forms fine, but more complex stuff, window managers, media players with odd shapes and over lays etc; you have to interact with the display server directly or its APIs anyway.

      More display servers more code paths and its not easy for one developer to test all that, sure they can have a bunch of VMs but now he has to know how work with multiple systems etc. It would be PITA. Its going to be bad enough for some with just X and Wayland to support.

      My guess is many won't end up supporting multiple display servers and if there are to many it will just fragment the Linux desktop worse than even in the bad old days.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    3. Re:How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 5, Informative

      The whole point about all of this, X/Wayland/MIR, is getting closer to the video card without having to yank one's hair out whilst doing it. Why would one need a little close interaction with the bare metal? If you've ever used Linux and saw tearing while moving windows around, then you've hit on one of the points for why closer to metal is a bit more ideal.

      With that said, let's not fool ourselves and think, "OMG, they just want access to the direct buffers!" That wouldn't be correct. However, developers want to have an ensured level of functionality with their applications visual appearance. If the app shows whited out menus for half a second, blink, and then there is your menu options, then there is something very wrong.

      It was pretty clear that with X, politically speaking, that developers couldn't fix a lot of the problems due to legacy and the foaming at the mouth hordes that would call said developer out for ruining their precious X. You can already see those hordes from all the "take X and my network transparency from my cold dead hands" comments. It is to a degree those people, and a few other reasons, that provided the impetus for Wayland. You just cannot fix X the way it should be fixed.

      Toolkits understand that display servers and pretty much the whole display stack in general suck. Granted there is a few moments of awesome, but they are largely out weighted by the suck factor, usually when you code an application, you'll note that sometimes you'll gravitate to the "winning" parts of the toolkit being used versus the pure suck ones. Qt has a multitude for all the OSes/Display Servers it supports. Be that Windows, Mac, X11, and so on. Likewise for GTK+ but to a lesser extent, but that is what make GTK+ a pretty cool toolkit. Because let's face it, no display stack is perfect in delivering every single developer's wish to the monitor. Likewise, no toolkit is perfect either. The GNOME and KDE people know this, they write specific code to get around some of the "weirdness" that comes with GTK+ or Qt. Obviously, that task is made slightly easier with Wayland and the way it allows a developer to send specifics to the display stack or even to the metal itself.

      Projects like KDE and GNOME have to write window managers and a lot of times those window managers have to get around some of the most sucktacular parts of the underlying display server. However, once those parts are isolated, the bulk of the work left is done in the toolkit. So display servers matter a bit to the desktop environments because they need to find all of the pitfalls of using said display server and work around them. Sometimes, it can be as simple as a patch to the toolkit or the display server upstream. Sometimes it can be as painful as a kludge that looks like it was the dream of a madman, all depends on how much upstream a patch is needed to be effective and how effective it would be for other projects all around.

      That leads into the problem with MIR. MIR seems pretty gravitated to its own means. If KDE has a problem with MIR that can be easily fixed with a patch to MIR or horribly fixed by a kludge in KDE's code base, it currently seems that the MIR team wouldn't be as happy go lucky to accept the patch if it meant that could potentially delay Ubuntu or break some future unknown to anyone else outside of MIR feature. Additionally, you have the duplicated work argument as well, which I think honestly holds a bit of water. I fondly remember the debates of aRts and Tomboy. While I think it's awesome that Ubuntu is developing their own display server, I pepper that thought with, "don't be surprised if everyone finds this whole endeavor a fools errand."

      I think the NIH argument gets tossed around way too much, like its FOSS McCarthyism. Every team has their own goals and by their very nature, that would classify them as NIH heretics. Canonical's idea is this mobile/desktop nexus of funafication, MIR helps them drive that in a way that is better suited to them. That being said

    4. Re:How are these things related? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because it doubles the work that they have to do to support both servers, and massively increases the complexity and bugs that come from working around inconsistencies between the two servers.

      It's like supporting IE6, then suddenly you need to support the new IE and Webkit. And IE6, too, for legacy reasons. And they all use a non-standard document language.

    5. Re:How are these things related? by Uecker · · Score: 2

      You: "You just cannot fix X the way it should be fixed."
      Reality: "... It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X..." (Wayland FAQ)

      And now?

    6. Re: How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      That's correct, you can as in technically possible. However you cannot because it would cause some breakage with legacy applications that the foaming mob of X11 zealots would stone the developer. The X11 fan base is so feverish they'll scream at any and all changes, I mean look at them when you threaten their 'network transport'. So while it is technically possible, it is impossible given the current inertia that the X11 fans have for change.

    7. Re: How are these things related? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      This is all horseshit anyway. Any decent windowing system would be implemented with ncurses.

    8. Re: How are these things related? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it would not cause breakage. In fact, it *does* not cause breakage, because the changes are actually implemented in X (DRI3 and present extension). Also X11 has a long history of backwards compatible upgrades (GLX, XRender, DRI1, DRI2, DRI3, composite, ...), so your comment about the "mob of X11 zealots" who do not want change is totally out of place.

    9. Re:How are these things related? by snadrus · · Score: 1

      You just cannot fix X the way it should be fixed.

      Translation: It's protocol-oriented.

      Wayland is the obvious choice

      Really? It's protocol-oriented too (and is slow-progressing because of that).

      Mir is library-oriented so no-longer will DEs paper-over the ugly parts, but instead they'll just fix the client library.

      --
      Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
    10. Re:How are these things related? by getaceres · · Score: 1

      "However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option." (Wayland FAQ) That X can be patched for the Nth time and add more bullshit on top of it just to be able to cope with modern systems doesn't mean it should be done. X is centered around network transparency which is not used in 99.9% of the times in modern systems so wayland is doing what's right: simplify all this mess so doing composition and hardware accelerated operations easy in 99.9% of the systems in which the GPU is in fact in the same machine of the display and leave all the old X code as a compatibility option just used by this remaining 0.1% of people. It's about simplification and maintainability.

    11. Re:How are these things related? by Uecker · · Score: 1

      Ok. You thank you for agreeing that X is not unfixable. Now we could discuss if this "simplification" is worth breaking API compatiblity. I think it is not: Breaking compatibility is rarely a good thing.

      But atleast one is now at a point where one could discuss it. If you look at all the comments here: The discussion is not about this, instead it is full of FUD: X is unfixable broken, X would enforce an outdated rendering model on applications, X is bloated, etc. In truth: The only point of wayland is to make the code simpler by breaking an API which is a decade old.

    12. Re:How are these things related? by getaceres · · Score: 1

      Everything is fixable by adding patches and complexity and forcing really difficult and over engineered models on top of something that will be very rarely used. Now I have to disagree with you. As a developer, breaking API compatibility is sometimes a relieve, allows you to advance faster and design better solutions when the requirements have changed significantly from the original ones. The thing is that 99.9% of computers nowadays have a local graphic card capable of 3D rendering and that 99.9% of people don't care about network transparency so breaking an API designed around a model which is not needed anymore sounds like a really good idea to me. Specially if the major players like KDE and GNOME groups are on board and will support the new graphic system.

    13. Re:How are these things related? by Uecker · · Score: 1

      Well. I don't think it is overengineered. In fact, I think that X is rather nicely engineered at its core. Admittedly, it accumulated some hacks, but I don't think that this is so bad as usually claimed here in discussions (and never really backed up with concrete examples). Also, I don't think that network transparency has that impact on the design you say (and yes, I have a Xorg source tree checked out here, compared to mozilla or gcc this is not too bad). From a design point of view, X and Wayland are similar: commands go over a socket. For local clients over a UNIX domain socket. So why do you think that network transparency add so much complexity? Yes, one has to support sending buffers of the network in addition to fast local methods (which X also had for a long time), but that does not seem to add a lot of complexity to me. Or, in other words: I simply do not buy the argument that the Wayland design is so much simpler and better, and especially not because it does not have network transparency.

      I also disagree that network transparency is not needed. I use it every day and there is a lot of talk on how to add it back to Wayland - in an incompatible way. In fact, thinking a bit of the future, a lot of optimizations for buffer sharing with the GPU will be irrelevant once GPU are fully integrated with the CPU again, while network transpareny will just get more and more important.

    14. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      So just make sure you don't remove useful functionality with your 'improvement'. You claim X has cruft nobody uses? Fine, mark it deprecated and see if anyone actually cares (you might be surprised what is used). If nobody cares, remove it from the next version.

      As for the network transport, that is not some minor and obscure feature, it gets used all the time. For example, virt-manager uses it along with ssh for remote VM consoles. Sounds pretty useful and modern to me. If Wayland can't do it well, it's as much a non-tarter a a soapbox racer would be at LeMans.

    15. Re: How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      So just make sure you don't remove useful functionality with your 'improvement'.

      Which is why X cannot be fixed the way it should be fixed. There is always going to be some group of people that uses some random function of X that is horribly ineffective. I can pretty much bet you a lunch that one can point to any random function of X and find some group of people that rely on that function. Most of these functions just get in the way of the majority of users that just want to use desktop applications. I mean come on, who really uses XPrint? Or needs a non-rectangular window? I guess if that's what you need, go for it, but Wayland offers a better method for implementing your own method for doing those things rather than a bunch of hacks in X11.

      For example, virt-manager uses it along with ssh for remote VM consoles.

      It is also a horribly ineffective way of doing it, but no one is going to stop you from using one of the worst methods of doing that. If that's how you roll, then that's how you roll. But mind you, it is the reason why X cannot be fixed. The network transport is feature of X is horrible because most WMs draw to a pixbuf and then send the pixbuf to the remote client. The only thing is, there are a ton of other clients out there that will draw you a picture and send it across the wire a whole lot faster than X can do it. With built in security too to boot. However, I'm not here to convince you of anything except this. You cannot fix X, it is broken and simply cannot be fixed because, among other reasons, there are too many diehards that will cling to every little feature of X11. These types of discussions where people argue old crusty features are the reason why X developers started working on Wayland. They needed a clean break, they needed a new project where people wouldn't be sitting there yelling about dropping feature A, B, or C. If Wayland doesn't fit for you, don't move to it, that easy. But X11 is old, slow, and bloated and if that's what you need, then go for it.

    16. Re:How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      As you know there are lot of protocol-oriented application implementations out there are insanely useful and their effectiveness is hardly ever challenged. For example, TCP as a generic and NTP as a more application specific example.

      Being protocol based isn't instantly a mark of slowness, just like using a hash map isn't a sign of slowness versus a binary tree. It is how it is used and X has had so much tacked on and so many extensions that need to be negotiated, it's just turned into a really bad use of a pretty good protocol.

      Mir is library-oriented so no-longer will DEs paper-over the ugly parts, but instead they'll just fix the client library.

      I think I had covered that quite well. Most DEs are working well with the Wayland team of patches upstream to ensure that if there is a specific thing they need, they get an out for it. If it is a generic fix, everyone wins as the patch is taken upstream. The problem with MIR is that if the MIR team changes on the dime the underlying API, your client library is going to be needing a slight overhaul. Libraries are a great way to solve what we're talking about so long as the libraries can be kept fairly stable. That's not really a sure thing, or at least I don't think anyone from the MIR team has said, "We are for real, for sure that this part is never going to change except in major revisions." Last I checked, pretty much the whole collection of things in MIR were all works in progress.

      Again, nothing bad about MIR except that with it being mostly developed by a single team, it just isn't ready for other to try and base compositors off of it, just yet. However, just because something is implemented is a certain way, doesn't mean, that is gets tossed into the crap realm. Even binary trees are a bad idea for some applications. Go grab a book by Bjarne Stroustrup, he makes a way better case for fighting this kind of thinking than I ever could. That's not a vote of confidence for C++, but that the guy makes some really good generic programming arguments for bad thinking in the Computer Science arena.

    17. Re:How are these things related? by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      Network transparency isn't a problem anyway. X isn't network transparent anymore for the vast majority of applications (no one uses Motif any more), it's only network capable. And just take a look at Windows: it works just fine over a network, much better in fact than Linux, thanks to RDP. I hate to praise Windows over Linux, but for doing GUI work over a network, Windows wins hands-down. Even better, RDP is an open protocol (or at least it has an open-source implementation, which is why you can remote into a Windows system using "rdesktop" on Linux), so it wouldn't be hard to use RDP in Wayland for viewing single windows or the entire desktop remotely.

    18. Re: How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      Also, I like how you pointed out X tunneling over ssh. Which has been shown time and time again as the slowest method for remote connections into a system hands down. Yes, it's nice in that it is easy on admin costs and takes very little to get up and running, however, that comes at the cost of it being slow. Just to compare, Doing Mathlab via X11 over ssh versus (randomly grabbing a tool out of thin air that I know is a really bad choice) VNC. X11 over ssh is close to about 35 seconds to finally see the window appear on the remote client. VNC is roughly three tenths a second. That's just doing wall clock figures so don't take that as a scientific thing, but you can check out Google and see all the "Why is X11 tunneling so slow" hits.

      I'm just saying, if X11 tunneling is what you are hanging onto, there are tons of other ways to do the exact same thing with less of a bandwidth cost and less suck. Again, I get that X11 tunneling is really easy to setup and other solutions can be a pain to get setup up. But you pay the setup cost once, you pay the bandwidth fee per usage.

    19. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      If Wayland doesn't fit for you, don't move to it, that easy. But X11 is old, slow, and bloated and if that's what you need, then go for it.

      If the Wayland supporters weren't continually talking about making sure X goes away and forcing everyone onto Wayland, that would be fine.

      They could also stand to learn a thing or two about IPC. Did you know that modern PC's access memory by sending a request on a very local network and receiving a reply? In some cases the messages are routed through a neighboring CPU. UNIX sockets use shared memory.

      The sad part is that if Wayland would learn that, it might actually be a great thing.

      I haven't heard a lot of people complaining about Xprint and such. I have head MANY MANY people complaining about the lack of proper network capability and the whole head in the sand response to that very valid criticism.

    20. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      I have used VNC, but it fails hard at the whole seamless integration thing. Same for RDP. Networks are getting faster and lower latency every day.

      There are some X apps that make really inefficient use of the X protocol. Fixing them wouldn't be a bad thing at all. Personally, I find the remote apps to respond quite nicely even over a cablemodem connection.

      So, if there is this vastly superior way to do that exact thing, name it.

    21. Re: How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      If you think X11 is going away anytime soon, then you've been horribly misled. Yes the Wayland folks want it to go away but we're in too deep for X11 to disappear anytime this decade. That's just a show of how dug in some are with X. I'm not sure what IPC issue you speak of but I do know that X11 takes in 1270ish points in the API for IPC alone. Wayland's stands at 135. The API is greatly simplified so if you have a better scheme in mind, you have a lot of liberty to, 'go it alone'. The last bit isn't a head in the sand. It's a not our domain to implement thing. Which I think it's a good thing that they focus on the display stack and not network bits.

    22. Re: How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      There obviously isn't any point. I don't think I'll ever be able to convince you personally that the feverish hang ups that you have with X are the exact same things that has played out on X11 mailing lists for the last decade and a half that has gotten X11 nowhere. The whole XFree/X.org breakup was all politically motivated. Same thing here. There is just too much drag to worry about trying to fix X11, it just isn't worth the headache to fix. Fixing X just causes more problems and more headaches. Might as well start clean.

      There are things that are worth the argue, but I doubt that we'll ever be able to agree on anything with this topic. For me, X11 just isn't worth continuing to prop up. For you, you see it as some vital thing. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

    23. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Point me to that superior way you speak of. You do actually know of one, don't you? You sure implied that you did by confidently claiming there is one.

      My guess is you were bluffing and just got called. Lay those cards down and let's just see!

      As for XFree/XOrg, the big difference is that it resulted in XOrg, a capable display system that worked much better than XFree.

      There is a capability that I see a being well worth maintaining, the ability to operate over a network without a crazy Rube Goldberg setup involving a massive use of resources on the remote side. X11 happens to fulfill that requirement currently. I am open to an alternative that does the job at least as well as X11. If I wanted a clunky half solution, I'd be using Windows.

    24. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      I don't think X11 is going away, the Wayland people do. They seem anxious to get rid of it fast and cram Wayland down my throat. They are so incredibly rude they don't even seem to understand why that might make people want them to fail.

      Communication between app (client) and display server is IPC. Even if you use shared memory, it is IPC.

    25. Re: How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      Feverish much?

      There isn't a point because you'll just sit here and come up with half brained reasons as to why it is wrong. So why even go down the road to begin with? It'll just lead to a conversation that neither of us really want to have, wouldn't you agree?

      X11's tunneling isn't worth it to me and that's the way I feel about the matter, case closed. It obviously is something you are worth foaming at the mouth about, so if that's what tickles your fancy so be it. We just don't agree on how we'd go about implementing like solutions, like I said, we'll just have to agree to disagree. If you find that hard to swallow, that isn't exactly my problem. However that's what we have in front of us. Neither one of us agrees on the solution, presenting our so called facts will just stroke more flames, and I'm pretty sure both of us have better things we could be doing with our time than to talk about pieces of software.

      Do you have anything else you'd like to add? I'll be more than happy to enter a reasonable debate about the matter, but I doubt from your tone that we'd have a reasonable debate. Don't you think that this thread might be a bit too hot to really have any useful discussion?

      As for XFree/XOrg, the big difference is that it resulted in XOrg, a capable display system that worked much better than XFree.

      What do you think happened to XOrg? XOrg has suffered greatly from a lot of in fighting that sounds a lot like what you and I are having at the moment. Why do you think that has happened? You say the split resulted in a much better display system, why do you think that would not happen with Wayland? It is one thing to have outside people say X11 sucks, but it is an altogether different thing to have X11 developers say X11 sucks. Why do you think they say that?

      I'm more than happy to entertain the thought that X11 has some saving grace, but I and a lot of X11 developers are drawing blanks when posited the same question. The world has changed and X11 is too large to move as agile as the world would want it. The exact same thing could be said about IPv6, or the new firewall code in the Linux kernel, or btrfs, and so on. There are a ton of pieces of software where better, more agile things have come along and people just aren't ready to give up the old to make way for the new. Eventually those new things will become old and we'll all have the same arguments all over again. All that being said, maybe you can understand why I am so tired of these rehashed arguments. I've had twenty years of having these types of (quote fingers)discussions(quote fingers), I'm pretty much done with them. Maybe, you aren't that way and perhaps that's a fault of me, but I just can't stomach this kind of back and forth. Hopefully you can understand that.

      So like I said, maybe we can *both* cool off a bit and have a reasonable discussion some point down the road. However, I just don't think we're going to have that at this moment.

      If you honestly want my opinion on remote options I'll relent, but only if you wish to push the matter more. Whatever it is that gives you some piece of mind.

    26. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      *PLONK*

    27. Re: How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      I think, and I dislike this disjoined thread so maybe we can move it all back into one thread, if you ask the Wayland team, they'd be the first to tell you that X11 isn't going anywhere. There is a difference between wishful thinking and the reality. The Wayland people are anxious to have a more testers for their display system. Distros are ultimately the ones who decided to "cram" it down your throat. The Wayland people have good reason to see the end of X, because many of the X developers are on the Wayland team. They see X as taking time away from Wayland, however, they acknowledge that X is a pretty important piece of software and that supporting it for the near future is a pretty big item on the list. Additionally, yeah they are a bit rude, but they have non-stop email after email on their list yelling about how wrong they are. So yeah, maybe they've gotten a bit jaded. Do you blame them?

    28. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      If they would accept the massive feedback that yes, that particular feature is very much necessary and then act on it, they could probably get rid of about 90% of the objections out there (or more). Instead, they keep making outlandish claims that X can't do what I do with it every single day. That isn't winning any friends (or developers). Don't claim it will be ever so simple to bolt it on later while complaining about thing bolted on to X and then naming a 'solution' that is clearly nowhere near the objective of being as good as X. I can't tell if it's a case of mass self deception or lying through their teeth, but it certainly isn't going to silence the critics. All it will do is exactly what it ha done, cat a shadow of distrut on the whole thing. At this point, they might not be believed even if they say they have seen the light. Nobody likes being deceived.

      I could as easily say I want Wayland to fail hard now so resources can go into a proper re-design of X. Perhaps they're not getting enough defectors because the rest of the potential defectors see network capability as too important to hand wave away? They might get heaps more defectors if they were willing to accept that perhaps it is more important than they thought.

      Even in this thread, you for some reason mistake my simple statement that easy to use network support such as X has is a must for any successor and somehow decide I will never accept anything but X in it's current form. Why is that? I will readily agree that X has collected a bunch of cruft and could stand a new spin.

      I've even hinted at a way out. ANYTHING that can be done in shared memory can be done as message passing Yes, I did, in fact, once implement remote shared memory over TCP. Yes, it was slow because the library had to deal with context switches and limited granularity in the hardware mechanism (page permissions and catching SEGV) and that the program using it had to be completely unaware that the shared memory was remote. However, things are easy the other way around, where message passing can be easily implemented using shared memory when it's available.

      So in summary to the Wayland developers and supporters: Yes, X really does work over the network. Well enough to use every day for the vast majority of applications. Yes, I am open to a new display system. Yes, lack of network capability on par with X (preferably better) is a deal breaker. Feel free to deprecate or just drop Xprint. Feel free to simplify Xinput. Quit peeing on my leg and telling me it's raining.

    29. Re: How are these things related? by dkf · · Score: 1

      So just make sure you don't remove useful functionality with your 'improvement'. You claim X has cruft nobody uses? Fine, mark it deprecated and see if anyone actually cares (you might be surprised what is used). If nobody cares, remove it from the next version.

      X has cruft that nobody sane uses except in pre-defined canned forms. Do you know what the system of visuals and colormaps does? Do you think that you should know? I've got something of an idea, and nobody's needed such a thing for at least 10 years now; hardware is such that everyone can support full color displays at any resolution you might need without any problems.

      Speaking as a part-time maintainer of a toolkit library.

      --
      "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
    30. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      So you don't use it and you won't yelp when it gets marked deprecated. Neither will anyone else. Excellent, another bit of cruft gone.

      But yes, I do remember the bad old days when you had a pallet of (IIRC) 16 colors or worse, a fixed pallet in CGA. I would place the need closer to 15 years ago.

    31. Re:How are these things related? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Qt.

      Get it right. Learn to write properly.

    32. Re: How are these things related? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      @Sjames

      Networking on Wayland is mostly like Windows RDP. Which works fantastically over WANs. So local is an upgrade over X11, WAN is an upgrade over X11 and LAN is a downgrade. That's a reasonable tradeoff given today and likely future usage.

    33. Re: How are these things related? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      You can't add network transparency later. It is a fundamental design choice. If application and display buffers are shared then lots of things simplify and you get performance improvements but transparency is out the window. That's why you can't have transparency under GDI, Aqua or Aero for example.

    34. Re: How are these things related? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      Networks are getting faster and lower latency every day.

      What? They are getting higher latency every day. We are increasing hops by doing things like wireless or bouncing off bluetooth. Moreover fundamentally we can't make the planet smaller of the speed of light faster. So there is nothing in the near tern that's likely to bring X11 latencies down to acceptable levels for WAN.

      And in the other direction, screens are getting bigger (though OpenGL offers a workaround here) faster than memory is getting faster. So pushing windows buffers around of multiple megabytes is stressing performance for local.

    35. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Wayland IPC i shared memory.

      There ha been hand waving mumble mumble RDP mumble. The compositor finally grew some RDP capability, but it's whole desktop, not individual window.

      Keep in mind that ssh can compress the relayed X11 conenction.

    36. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Read my post again. If it can't work over the network, it will never be used by me.

      They could have easily enough designed an IPC that could work remotely yet use shared memory when available but they didn't. Lack of foresight isn't a very good selling point!

    37. Re: How are these things related? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      @Sjames

      That's not true. The RDP can be individual windows or even less, it is up the the widget set. How KDE or Gnome implement it will be up to them not the Wayland team.

    38. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      Even wireless is getting lower in latency as the tech improves.

      10 years ago, 120ms was a decentish ping time over the Internet. 5 years ago, 50ms was considered good. Today I get 14ms. So, YES, latency is getting lower.

    39. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      RDP as a protocol can do it, but the implementation in the compositor cannot.

    40. Re: How are these things related? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      The compositor is just going to provide the most basic level the hooks for the GUI implementation. This isn't like X11 where X11 is going to do most of the heavy lifting for networking. The RDP is mostly going to be at the GUI level with the Wayland having hooks.

    41. Re: How are these things related? by sjames · · Score: 1

      But currently, the scheme I mentioned is the only one existent for Wayland. Surely anything that is going to make a native Wayland app display remotely is going to have to look like a compositor to the app. The display side of the connection will have to look like the app to the compositor there.

    42. Re: How are these things related? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      They are not following the X11 model. From a networking perspective there is not going to be a "native Wayland app" but rather a "native KDE app" or a "native Gnome app". The connection is going to be KDE application to client's KDE library with Wayland providing hooks on both sides. Wayland cannot possible know enough about the applications to make intelligent choices about things like caching and prioritization, while the client's GUI libraries can do that. Which is exactly how RDP works.

      Now you are absolutely right that the only one existence is the Wayland model. Last year that one wasn't existent. Both KDE and Gnome have announced they are going to start working the Wayland model into their systems. My guess is this takes several years and probably a really good implementation will require breaking changes and so will be done for the next major release (Gnome 4, KDE 5). As they start seriously moving in this direction Gnome 4 / KDE 5 will have to make a choice about whether they are Wayland primarily with some level of X11 support or whether they are X11 with some Wayland advanced features. I suspect Gnome having already decided touch (where getting down to 1ms latency is incredibly important) is key will definitely make the change.

      So no. This is not going to be naive networking. This is going to be intelligent networking where the vast majority of applications / GUIs / toolkits will know they are talking over a network and will be expected to compensate and respond intelligently to the additional complexity. This is not "network transparency" because it is not transparent to the application / toolkit. Now there may be some base Wayland way of doing things, using the built in RDP structures entirely but that's going to suck. Possibly it will suck a little less than X11 over WAN sucks because there will be less roundtrips and more happening locally, but that's not the final desired result. Possibly it will suck a little more because unlike the X11 case no one is going to care too much about making it work well, so that while in theory it will be better that may only be in theory. The goal is to implement RDP for Linux and that requires the cooperation of parts higher than Wayland on the stack.

      Application designers are quite likely going to spend time coming up with application, data and window caching and prioritization strategies that make sense for their application. GUI designers are quite likely going to spend time coming up with application, data and window caching and prioritization strategies that make sense for their application. And those strategies will change as use cases change. It is entirely possible for example that a local wired connection with a latency under 20ms will do things entirely different than an international or cellular connection with latencies around 150ms. And if you think about it makes sense to push the intelligence as far up the chain as possible. The specific runtime can make better choices than the application and compile time can make better choices than the GUI can make better choices than Wayland.

    43. Re: How are these things related? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      I read your post. I guess in some truly vague sense I could locate a pool of memory at both points and including a synchronization mechanism in them. But if everything expects latencies in the nanosecond range with gigabytes of bandwidth per second and I move to latency in the millisecond range with bandwidth of megabytes per second things will slow down a lot. 5-10ms of jitter is highly noticeable and disturbing. An application going from 2ms to 2seconds of jitter is going to go from subconsciously uncomfortable to completely uninterpretable by the human brain. X11 does a lot to compensate for differences in performance. None of that is there with just a naive buffer.

      As for the rest, about what you are or are not going to use ultimately unless you are networking on a LAN I think the networking in Wayland will be so superior there will be no holdups. So say by 2020 you will be using Wayland. But Wayland's first use case is completely local getting performance for things like video and games up when both the server and client are on the same machine.

      More generally though. End users aren't going to really vote on X11 vs. Wayland. X11 on Wayland works fine so there is going to be no good reason for the clients not to be on Wayland. I'm sure there is going to be some stubborn group of people who insist on X11, but ultimately the hardware aren't going to support X11, nor are the distributions going to focus on it so they'll mostly get moved in a few years after the main body of Linux users move regardless. The choice is at the application writer side. The applications are going to have to decide if they want to implement X11 or Wayland. If they pick Wayland then there is no X11 networking: you either use the Wayland networking, you don't network or you pick a different application. And frankly the advantages for local (and WAN networking) are going to be so huge I can't see application designers making the X11 choice. Plus as I mentioned in the other thread, its possible the toolkits will move forcing the applications. So I don't really see it as optional.

      This is like any other upgrade. Some people resist for a while but eventually everyone goes. I remember people holding on to XyWrite on dot matrix printers well into the 1990s, but there are probably 0 doing it still today. Sure there will be some group of people who try and maintain X11 after Wayland becomes normative. Sure there will be distributions focused on X11. But honestly how passionate do you see those people 5 years later? Do you really see people sticking with making those distributions for years out of nothing but spite?

    44. Re: How are these things related? by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      What's funny about that is that we use VNC-tunnelled-over-SSH everyday (remote helpdesk connections to Windows and Linux stations) without issues. Even when the remote desktop has dual-monitors configured, although that can take a bit of horizontal and/or vertical scrolling of the local VNC client window.

      Tunnelling over SSH is not slow. Especially if you enable the NONE cipher on boths ends. :) Not recommended if you are going over public Internet links, but can work wonders within an organisation.

      Tunnelling X11 over SSH can be slow, but can also be made fast using NX. Downside to that is that it's full-desktop remoting, not per-application remoting. But it works wonders for staff and students to access their Linux accounts at the schools from home (even across ADSL links).

      We can even watch 480p youtube videos in Firefox via VNC-over-SSH across ADSL links (it's choppy but watchable). E10 (10 Mbps) sites make it no different than watching locally (with the exception of the complete lack of sound). Using NX makes even the ADSL link enjoyable. And that's all done over SSH (without compression enabled in the SSH client/server).

      IOW, tunnelling over SSH is not slow. Whatever app/protocol you are tunnelling will determine the "speed" of the remote app.

    45. Re: How are these things related? by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      The whole conversation is less about SSH and more about X11. I don't think anyone is saying SSH is slow.

    46. Re: How are these things related? by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      You were going on about how X11-over-SSH is so slow, and using VNC is so much better/faster as there's no SSH in the way.

      I was saying that SSH is not slow, as we use VNC-over-SSH all the time.

      And that X11-over-SSH is not slow, as we use the NX Client all the time (which is X11-over-SSH).

      X11 by itself can be very slow over the network. But it doesn't have to be (just look at NX as an example).

      Thus, doing things in a similar way to X11 doesn't mean it will be inherently slow.

    47. Re: How are these things related? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Damn, you are fucking retarded,

  12. Re:oh good by MightyMartian · · Score: 0

    Because Metro sure knocked the socks off of everything...

    It points to a new direction; you know one where UI designers cut the tops off their skulls, take an ice cream scooper and remove about two thirds of the brains, put the top of the skull back on.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  13. Just one question... by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just one question. If the display server is of such minimal importance in the big scheme of things, then why did Canonical develop their own?

    1. Re:Just one question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You missed the point. The point is that the display server doesn't matter to *application developers*. I does matter to the whole system, so that's why Canonical is making one.

  14. Display server matters for some people by loonycyborg · · Score: 1

    Namely gui toolkit developers, driver developers and DE developers. All of the above aren't very fond of MIR..

  15. True and false. by Kremmy · · Score: 1

    Fact is that I can remotely control almost any computer running on almost any platform utilizing countless different variations of the theme of 'render to the display - wait, let's render to an image instead then send it over the wire'

    The reason so much attention is being put on display servers is as a distraction from the real problems, such as the fact that so much attention is being put on the display servers. They're not the weak point, there are a lot of them, and one exercise that remains THROUGHOUT COMPUTING HISTORY, is the task of updating software and porting it to another display server, because at the end of the day you're drawing colored rectangles on a screen.

    1. Re:True and false. by amorsen · · Score: 1

      I believe the main difference is that remote X is rootless. People like that. Somehow they forget that remote X is non-persistent, uselessly slow, and that session integration is almost entirely missing.

      Do not misunderstand me, I would love a persistent rootless remote display with decent performance and session integration. Alas, X is not it.

      --
      Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
  16. So why did Apple and Google toss it? by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The most significant transition of a unix-style OS to the desktop is OSX. The most significant transition of a unix-style OS to handhelds is Android. X was left behind both times. Why did they re-invent the wheel if there was no need to do so?

    1. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not only that, but each example (NeXT/OSX and Android) are undeniable success stories.

      X11 has severe limitations, like a cramped network abstraction layer that can't share windows or desktops with multiple people. Supposedly the NX server gets around this, but the X11 people haven't shown any interest in adopting the NX features.

      People need displays that look like they computer is operating smoothly (instead of barfing text-mode logs here and there when transitioning between users, runlevels, etc).

      People need to share their windows (efficiently, not with VNC) for teleconferencing.

      Both OS X and Windows achieved these by focusing on the display server. So, as much as I respect Canonical's work, I think this blogger/dev is somewhat clueless.

    2. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by Uecker · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And both are now incompatible ecosystems. Do we want to repeat this nonsense?

    3. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by garyebickford · · Score: 3, Interesting

      WRT to OSX, there is history. Back in the days of NeXT, Jobs & co. decided to use Display Postscript for a variety of reasons. A few of the reasons: X back then was huge, ungainly and a total beast to work with using the limited memory and cycles available (The NeXTstation used a 25MHz 68000); their team were not ever going to be able to morph X into an object-oriented platform, which NeXT definitely was; Display Postscript was Adobe's new Hotness; the NeXT folks could write drivers for DP that worked with the Texas Instruments signal processor (TM-9900? I forget), which was truly amazingly fast at screen manipulation; and the X architecture didn't fit well with either Display Postscript or the TM-9900.

      In 2001 I had a NeXTstation that I added some memory and a bigger disk to. The machine was by then more than 10 years old. For normal workstation duties, it was faster than my brand new desktop machine due entirely to the display architecture. But compiling almost anything on that 25MHz CPU was an overnight task - I had one compile that ran three days.

      --
      It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
    4. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Because X is a hassle if you are a commercial entity and want to retain control on the GUI. Much less of a hassle if you develop openly in collaboration with xorg. They also probably don't want their applications being a couple of compiler flags away from a linux desktop, or their partners could pull a Valve whenever they felt like it.

    5. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Do we want to witness another hugely successful deployment of Linux?

      Why yes. Yes we do.

    6. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nice history lesson, but you realize that Apple threw away DPS and created Quartz for OS X, right?

    7. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by jedidiah · · Score: 1, Troll

      Single digit market share really isn't "hugely successful". MacOS based on Unix really isn't that much more successful than MacOS NOT based on Unix. Whatever "success" this alleged Unix has had really has nothing to do with it's Unix-ness. What meagre success it has had has been being tied to a well established brand name that's about as far away from Unix as you can get.

      What's the point of a "successful Linux" if it abandons all of the useful design ideas of Unix?

      At best, something like that is redundant. You can go somewhere else and buy that if you really want that. There's no need to pervert someone else's platform.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    8. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 2

      Its the not made here syndrome, plus the fact that Google and Apple want to create a fleet of applications that are totally incompatable with other platforms in order to create user lock in to their respective platforms. Obviously, business and political reasons and nothing to do with technical issues. X would have been a fine display platform for either but, then the platforms would be compatable with mainstream Linux distros and you would have portable applications so your users wouldnt be locked into your OS.

    9. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MacOS != OSX. If you think that then your screen sharing experience probably dates back to the days Timbuktu.

      Although the screen sharing service on OSX has a compatability layer for connecting VNC clients the native clients do not use the VNC protocol, they use ARDP (Apple Remote Desktop Protocol). ARDP is not a framebuffer-based protocol like VNC, it's graphic object-oriented like Microsoft RDP and Citrix. It works extremely well over remote links, complete with mutli-monitor support.

      Don't believe me? Try connecting to a remote OSX server (e.g.: over ADSL) using an OSX client, then try the same thing using a VNC client (such as Tiger, Tight, rdektop, etc.). VNC clients are so crap it takes them about 2 minutes just to paint the 2560x1440 login screen on a 27-inch iMac. The OSX client is sub-second.

    10. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      Isn't Quartz based on Display PDF, though?

    11. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by garyebickford · · Score: 1

      I haven't kept up, but it sez here::

      It is widely stated that Quartz "uses PDF" internally (notably by Apple in Quartz's early developer documentation[5]), often by people making comparisons with the Display PostScript technology used in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP (of which Mac OS X is a descendant). Quartz's internal imaging model correlates well with the PDF object graph, making it easy to output PDF to multiple devices.[6]

      --
      It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
    12. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right. Cos no geeks use OSX. It's horrible to have a lovely looking UI that also happens to be the best of the current desktop OSs. It's terrible that you can switch cleanly between e.g. fullscreen VMs with a single key combo, and get nice looking compositing for switching.

      I'd rather not have you near my user experience, start up any current Linux desktop and it just looks like ass.

    13. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by medoc · · Score: 1

      This is a sincere question: can I display a single remote app (either running on Linux or another Mac OS X) on a Mac OS X desktop, among other, local, windows ? Cause I do this permanently with X11, and this is really the main reason why I would not even consider switching to OS X.

    14. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by fredrickleo · · Score: 1

      OSX used to come with X11 as a separate install but they've stopped doing that. It appears they're supporting an open source http://support.apple.com/kb/ht... XQuartz project which does the same thing though.

      --
      Yay me! ^^
    15. Re:So why did Apple and Google toss it? by medoc · · Score: 1

      I knew about the X11 subsystem, but always found it inconvenient to use. I did not even know that it had been forked off by Apple, thanks for the pointers.

  17. Doesn't matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Whether display server matters or not, this debate doesn't matter. You need to support them both, or else you're doing a poor job.

    1. Re:Doesn't matter by allo · · Score: 1

      Why? When canonical tries to make an own OS instead of a linux distro, they should not require others to do the work for them.

  18. Slow News Day by SeaFox · · Score: 1

    Is there an actual story here, or it just about two different groups of open-source developers having a difference of opinion on whether display servers are important or not? The summary doesn't suggest this disagreement is having any real ramifications on Ubuntu/Kubuntu.

  19. He's Right by Luthair · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The canonical developer said that users don't care which I think is pretty accurate. The majority of users won't care as long as applications run and are responsive.

    1. Re:He's Right by geek · · Score: 0

      I'm a user and I care.

    2. Re:He's Right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      thing is, users *will* care once "applications run and are responsive" stops being true for the many applications which are not developed against or extensively tested against the display server they use.

    3. Re:He's Right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This already happened. The applications I use don't work in Wayland or Mir, so I don't care about either of them.

    4. Re:He's Right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah most users don't care and they run their apps on MS Windows.

      So Mr Canonical Idiot Developer why are you wasting your time and our time? Why are you writing all that crap? Like your blog post and Unity?

  20. Never really believed in Mir by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Back when Canonical announced they were working on Mir, my first reaction was like "are you guys serious?". Writing your own display server is not a trivial thing. I mean, it's not as simple as providing an API with a few classes and methods. It goes much further than that. You have to interface with kernel, display drivers, input devices, provide drawing context for 2D/3D graphics, manage things like video playback, provide framework for IPC between X applications, etc. And all this, is not achieved simply by writing a few lines of C code. It requires deep understanding of what is needed and properly designing architecture, protocols, APIs, etc. So basically, you need a dedicated team of people who really know what they're doing and have plenty of time and resources. I'm not convinced that Canonical has such a team or a big stash of money to pay them.

  21. Yes I can imagine. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I do not trust any "GUI UI Designer" to develop a useful UI. Why? Because their job depends on constant change, regardless of if it is better or not. Take cars, for example. Can you Imagen what the Unity team or KDE would do to you car? I can bet it would not have a wheel in the middle wipers on the right, turn signals on the left, ignition on the dash on the right, headlights on the dash on the left, and gear selector on the right in the center. (For left had drive) Nor would the peddles be clutch brake gas from left to right...

    I see you've driven a Toyota.

    Push the shift lever FORWARD to go BACK, and BACKWARDS to go FORWARD! It's intuitive! Just stand on your head (and that way you'll be able to see all the controls, too).

    And let's just not even talk about the "flying bridge" in the 2012+ Priapus... or any recent model of "infotainment" system from any car vendor....

    1. Re:Yes I can imagine. by Megol · · Score: 1

      Why is it not intuitive? It's easier to move something towards oneself than away so it is clearly better to have the common action (that of driving forward) mapped to the easiest move.

  22. Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Metro may not be good, but e.g. Windows 7 sure has a better working and cleaner UI than most Linux distros I've used. I mostly use XFCE (Xubuntu) nowadays, but it's still far from good even though it's the best one out there IMHO.

  23. Ubuntu and Canonical speak with fork tongue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Ubuntu and Canonical say a lot but you have to wonder if they forgot their roots. KDE is a rich and robust desktop eco-system. It has everything from windowing, widgets, plasmons, wallpapers and artwork to grandly complex integrated applications. KDE to this developer is nothing short of Cool on steroids.

    On the other hand, the desktop of a stock Ubuntu is crippling, lacking, stripped of options and toyish. Unity? Its nothing more than a program loader.

     

  24. KDE vs. Who? by s.petry · · Score: 1

    I've been a KDE user for a very long time, hated Gnome. Frankly I hate Unity even more Gnome (which is a lot). I've seen KDE do things that Microsoft can't, using less CPU and overall better performance, and it's always been compatible with X. So now we have a nextgen X and Canonical want's to disperse the market. Nothing new there, they did it with Unity. Fragmentation is good for some people, and I have to wonder if Canonical gets paid to cause fragmentation? Sure, they have a product that is "theirs" too, but who really likes "theirs" and why is theirs better for consumers?

    Look, if you happen to love Gnome you should have the same issues with this fragmentation as me being pro-KDE does. Years of getting Gnome X.X working properly and enough traction from users, and then a company creates a rift. Ubuntu makes some things easier for people not experienced with Linux, but they don't do UIs as Unity clearly demonstrates.

    If they are unhappy with Gnome or KDE why not put devs on the project instead of back door'ing their own?

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    1. Re:KDE vs. Who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Isn't that the truth! My feelings exactly. And as far as developers go and the development cycle, dueling display servers architectures will force the re-write or re-compilation of 1000s of apps. The different includes, the different preprocessor conditionals, the code alterations, the linking issues, and the duplication of standards. We already have another display server to write to and it's called MS. Windows. I think the guy earlier mentioned forks, it sounds like that is what Canonical is after. It's like Unity wasn't bad enough. Also, let me express my annoyance with systemd too. I hate it, and I can't figure it out nor do I have the time. So forget writing a /etc/init.d/startupmything script.

         

  25. Re:oh good by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Too easy to downmod you.
    From your comment about a shitty UI one can only conclude you have never used KDE.
    Although better graphics would be nice calling them amateurish is rather silly.

    I actually see KDE as the best Linux desktop right now: fast, feature-rich and stable. However I recently watched an interesting criticism piece regarding some funky and misleading behavior of this desktop environment. The user experience could be improved.

  26. Re:oh good by David_Hart · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because Metro sure knocked the socks off of everything...

    It points to a new direction; you know one where UI designers cut the tops off their skulls, take an ice cream scooper and remove about two thirds of the brains, put the top of the skull back on.

    Metro UI concepts are actually showing up in more and more places. The biggest problem with it was that Microsoft, in their wisdom, tried to force a touchscreen interface on desktop users. The interface itself isn't the problem, the lack of choice for the primary user was...

  27. Re:oh good by hawguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Although better graphics would be nice calling them amateurish is rather silly.

    Why? The KDE desktop looks like the state-of-the-art from say 1993. If I wanted my desktop to look like Xaw3d, I'd just fall through a time warp and go back there. At least the music was better.

    I'm pretty happy with my KDE desktop, but I use it as a tool to get work done, not because it looks pretty.

    I bought a hammer from the hardware store that looks almost exactly like the 1920's era hammer my great grandfather used (though the handle is fiberglass instead of wood), but it works well and gets the job done. Just because a desktop "looks" old doesn't make it useless. I tried Unity and Windows Metro and found them to be much less usable for my developer/operations tasks.

  28. Re:oh good by Tough+Love · · Score: 5, Insightful

    KDE 4 is great except for Akonadi, which killed Kmail.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  29. wayland, systemd by bzipitidoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Figured systemd would get dragged into this.

    One of the biggest problems with systemd is simply documentation. System administrators have a lot of learning invested in SysV and BSD, and systemd changes nearly everything. Changing everything may be okay, may be good, but to do it without explanation is bad no matter how good the changes. I'd like to see some succinct explanation, with data and analysis to back it up. Likely there is such an explanation, and I just don't know about it. But the official systemd site doesn't seem to have much, I'd also like to see a list with common system admin commands on one side, and systemd equivalents on the other, like this one but with more. For example, to look at the system log, "less /var/log/syslog" might be one way, and in systemd, it is "journalctl". To restart networking it might be "/etc/rc.d/net restart", and in systemd it's "systemctl restart network.service". Or maybe the adapter is wrongly configured, DHCP didn't work or received the wrong info, in which case it may be something like "ifconfig eth0 down" followed by an "up" with corrected IP addresses and gateway info.

    When information is not available, it looks suspicious. How can we judge if systemd is ready for production? Is well designed? And that the designers aren't trying to hide problems, aren't letting their egos blind them to problems? To be brusquely told that we shouldn't judge it we should just accept it and indeed ought to stop whining and complaining and be grateful someone is generously spending their free time on this problem, because we haven't invested the time to really learn it ourselves and don't know what we're talking about, doesn't sit well with me.

    Same goes for Wayland and MIR. Improving X sounds like a fine idea. But these arguments the different camps are having-- get some solid data, and let's see some resolution. Otherwise, they're just guessing and flinging mud. Makes great copy, but I'd rather see the differences carefully examined and decisions made, not more shouting.

    --
    Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
  30. displays have a server? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i'm not familiar with Linux but i guess the displays are connected to the internet? I tried reading the article but I got confused.

  31. Re:oh good by denmarkw00t · · Score: 2

    Windows 7 sure has a better working and cleaner UI

    Eh, maybe? If I turn off all the Aero or whatever and make it look like 9x, I can live with that. The translucent borders, Big Button start menu and "pins," the god-awful switcher...7 is probably my only choice for Windows moving forward, if I have to have it, but it won't look like it does after a fresh install for very long.

  32. Re:oh good by willoughby · · Score: 1

    They do that deliberately just to keep you away.

  33. Re:oh good by Megol · · Score: 2

    Compared to the Win32 API the GEOS one looks clean and nice. I mean the 8 bit GEOS BTW.

  34. Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Also impressive compared to McOS, and Windoze ate.

    And odds are you're a few years behind.

  35. Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is pure inertia. Metro concepts are showing up because "UI (or is it UX) experts" only use Windows as their operating system and think that since it's on their Microsoft desktop it must be good. Had Apple won the desktop early on, the concept of "right-clicking" would not be so pervasive.

  36. I've been using Wayland and systemd for nearly a m by Phil+Urich · · Score: 1

    SailfishOS, running on the current Jolla device, is quite smooth and nice, in a way that my N9 (despite the slickness of the design of the UI) never was. Both were underpowered hardware for their times, but Wayland allows the kinds of GPU-accelerated and compositing-oriented display that allow for what people are increasingly used to from other OSes.

    Now, in terms of systemd I'm more on your side, there's certainly a baseline of arrogance that the primary devs have shown. On the other hand, they seem sometimes to be justified, and while there was some shouting and mudflinging in the recent Debian decision, there were also some extremely thoughtful and thorough considerations that I read from Debian developers which convinced me that, despite some of its shortcomings, systemd is a needed improvement and is well thought out. Err, I can't seem to find any of them right now, but from a system administration perspective I do see this blog as a fairly succinct list of reasons why systemd is good for sysadmins. As one myself, who until now has worked merely on SysV or Upstart systems, many of those reasons do seem pretty compelling to me. So far I've only toyed with systemd in the phone that now resides in my pocket, however, so I certainly can't speak from direct experience yet. But I'm very interested to try it out.

    --
    I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
  37. Pathetic, sfcrazy. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For including a link to Muktware, the only linux site sleazier and more willing than publish sensationalistic crap than Phoronix.

  38. Re:oh good by MightyYar · · Score: 1

    But the professionals have moved on to nail guns.

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  39. Re:oh good by richlv · · Score: 1

    it (kde) could have a bit less bugs, though ;)

    --
    Rich
  40. Re:I've been using Wayland and systemd for nearly by Golthur · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My main issue with systemd is that it is monolithic; it violates the fundamental Unix philosophy in a most egregious way, and whenever anyone comments on this, we are (to quote the GP) "brusquely told that we shouldn't judge it we should just accept it and indeed ought to stop whining and complaining and be grateful someone is generously spending their free time on this problem, because we haven't invested the time to really learn it ourselves and don't know what we're talking about".

    We used to have separate, replaceable systems for each aspect of systemd - e.g. if you didn't like syslog, there was syslog-ng, or metalog, or rsyslog; each different and meant for a different purpose. Now, it's "all or nothing" - except that it's becoming progressively more difficult to opt for "nothing" because it's integrating itself into fundamental bits like the kernel and udev.

    --
    Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
  41. Re:oh good by GumphMaster · · Score: 2

    Good luck extracting a nail with your nail gun Mr. Professional.

    --
    Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
  42. Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Good luck extracting a nail with your nail gun Mr. Professional.

    pro gets it right first time, different tools for different fools said mr t

  43. Re:oh good by devent · · Score: 1

    1. New Folder
    Already fixed, the dialog shows now "New Folder 1", "New Folder 2", etc
    2. New Text File
    Fixed, see 1.
    3. Rename Dialog
    Not fixed, behaves the same way as in the video.
    4. Copy file
    Fixed, it says now "Paste one file"
    5. Dialog
    Not fixed, behaves the same way as in the video.
    6. Trash/delete dialog
    I disagree. Show the user all options in the menu, that is a good thing. But was fixed anyway. Now Shift+Menu will show "Delete". Without Shift it shows "Move to trash". Bad change.
    7. Open and Edit Trashed file
    Fixed.
    8. Trash moving/error
    Not fixed.
    9. Trash Create new File/Folder/Rename File
    Not fixed.

    --
    http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
  44. Re:oh good by JoeMerchant · · Score: 1

    Miss once, try again... miss twice, keep on shootin' - pulling nails is a waste of time, time is money, professionals aren't paid to save nails.

    Actually, "professionals" will miss the stud with 3 of 4 nails that are supposed to hold the sheathing, and "keep on rollin' 'till the day is done." This is why owner-built houses survive hurricanes and the same design built by a contractor doesn't.

  45. Bikeshed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What color would you like the bikeshed?

  46. Re:oh good by MightyYar · · Score: 1

    I don't know nuthin' about construction, but I know the sound of a hammer and the sound of a nail gun, and it's been a long time since I've walked by a construction site and heard the former. I have a feeling they have it worked out.

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  47. Display server does matter by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Obviously, display server does matter to users. If users cannot use a whole set of applications because they are not compatable with Distro Xs display server, that is a problem for users. This can be addressed by distros standardizing around display servers that uses the same protocol. Its also possible, but more complex, is if distros using different display protocols support each others display protocols by running a copy of a rootless display server that supports the others display protocol. Relying on widget sets to support all display protocols is too unreliable as we are bound to end up with widget sets which do not support some display protocols. Needless to say, it is best to have a single standard, it would have been easiest and best if Canonical had gone with Wayland and actually worked with Wayland to address whatever needs they had.

    Its also true a new display protocol wasnt really necessary. The issue with X was the lack of vertical syncronisation. X already has DRI, Xrender, Xcomposite, MIT SHM, and so on for other purposes. An X extension could have been created to allow a way for an application to get the timing of the display, the milliseconds between refreshes, the time of the next refresh, etc.. X applications could then use this timing information, starting its graphics operations just after the last refresh, X applications could then use an X command to place its finished graphics pixmap for a window into a "current completed buffer" for the window, allowing for double buffering to be used. This could be either a command to provide the memory address, or a shared memory location where the address would be placed. All of the current completed buffers for all windows are then composited in the server to generate the master video buffer for drawing to screen. There is a critical section during which the assembly of the master video buffer would occur, any current completed buffer swap by an application during that time by an application would have to be deferred for the next refresh cycle. A new XSetCompletedBuffer could be created which would provide a pointer to a pixmap, this is somewhat similar to XPutPixmap or setting the background of an X Window, but provided that XPutPixmap might do a memory copy it may not be appropriate, since the point is to provide a pointer to the pixmap that the X server would use in the next screen redraw. Said pixmaps would be used as drawables for opengl operations, traditional X primatives, and such. This scheme would work with all of the existing X drawing methods. the pixmaps are of course transferred using MIT SHM, its also possible to use GLX to do rendering server side, for use of x clients over the network, GLX is preferable, otherwise the entire pixmap for the window would have to be sent over the network. The GLX implementation already allows GL graphics to be rendered into a shared memory pixmap. Currently however, some drivers do not support GL rendering into a pixmap, only a pbuffer, which is not available in client memory at all, however, the DRI/GEM stuff is supposed to fix this and the X server should be updated to support GLX drawing to a pixmap with all such DRI drivers.

    Another issue is window position and visibility in how it relates to vertical synchronization. Simplistically the refresh cycle can be broken into an application render period and a master render period. If the X server has a whole pixmap buffer of a window, it grabs at a snapshot of the display window visibility/position state the beginning of the master rendering period and uses that to generate the final master pixmap by copying visible regions of windows into the master buffer.

    It can be a good idea to allow the option for applications to only render areas of their windows that are visible, this saves on CPU resources and also avoid needless rasterization of offscreen vector data. In order to do this, applications would need to access visibility data at the beginning of the application render period. Applications would then have to, instead of providing a single

  48. Re:oh good by GumphMaster · · Score: 1

    Next time look at what is hanging from the tool belt of nearly every woodworker on the site. They don't carry a hammer for decoration.

    --
    Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
  49. @MightyYar - Re:oh good by nukenerd · · Score: 1

    and it's been a long time since I've walked by a construction site and heard [a hammer]

    You should have walked past my place 4 weeks ago. Contractors were re-roofing my house and they used hammers. Made a good job too.

    1. Re:@MightyYar - Re:oh good by MightyYar · · Score: 1

      Did you have some kind of special roofing? I definitely hear the guns for asphalt. Not sure how they handle slate or metal.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    2. Re: @MightyYar - Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nail guns really dont do as good a job on shingles. They have a tendency to drive the nail too deep and cut through the shingle, or leave the head sticking up a little so you have to pull out your hammer to drive it down. With shingles sometimes you hit the rafter and sometimes just the sheathing, so you cant adjust the gun just perfect. And after a few months, or years or decades, of nailing on shingles, you get really really fast. And hand drives are a LOT cheaper. But the guns nice on big boring roofs where you can have like four guys placing shingles as fast as they can and one guy just walking down the line bam! Bam! Bam! with the gun.

    3. Re:@MightyYar - Re:oh good by nukenerd · · Score: 1

      Did you have some kind of special roofing? I definitely hear the guns for asphalt. Not sure how they handle slate or metal.

      It is slate (artificial, but slate-like). I should think a nail gun would shatter it. But they also used hammers to fix the underlying battens.

      Not sure what advantage a nail gun would bring unless someone is making something like cheap furniture in a mass-production factory, the gun fed by nails down a flexible tube. Have guys become such pussies that they cannot move their arms any more, or is it that the 'Elf & Safey Nazis ae terrified someone will hit their thumbnail?

      I suspect the "advantage" of a nail gun is that it de-skills the task. I am often using a hammer and find it fast, accurate and satisfactory, and havn't hit my thumbnail since I was a child making a box-cart. I suspect that the "professionals" who use nail guns are the ones fresh from the local job centre, the ones who don't bother to move their feet to do the further nails, which therefore end up at a crazy angle (not so easy with a hammer) . Real experts would use the hammer.

    4. Re:@MightyYar - Re:oh good by MightyYar · · Score: 1

      It's faster and you don't deal with loose nails. I think hammers are still a must, but real experts use the best tool for the job, not the one that best demonstrates their unique skills.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  50. Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wow. First of all, I never did such things. I probably tried to recover something from the trash bin and might have hit the read-only bug, I'm not sure.

    This constant, systematic create/move/delete cycle is something like Quality Assurance and should be done, but I doubt it represents some true life use case.

    I also have my opinions about what is described:

    1. It should not IMHO increase numbers like Windows does. The point is "New folder" is a template name, the user should be forced to name things, lest anarchy will prevail. The only ones to benefit from auto-numbering are little children who want to create a lot o icons on the screen;
    6. I also disagree. Del does what it said before, even on Windows: it moves things to the trash bin. Shift+del actually deletes the item forever, also just like Windows. Sorry but that's usual behavior.

    Seeing some of the errors, it seems there are templates which are used for each file created, which could mean there really is a copy process occurring in the backstage. Of course, the normal terminology knows nothing about that.

    After all that, I still think KDE is richer and more advanced than any other desktop, though admittedly I expect Macs to do less but do correctly. The problem I have is the "less" part, since KDE is very configurable.

    Of course, it's important to fix what's wrong; even though some of the operations are unlikely to occur in day-to-day use, other ones are indeed somewhat to be expected and will confuse users.

  51. Re:oh good by MightyYar · · Score: 1

    To continue the analogy, sometimes you gotta use the shell...

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  52. Re:oh good by GumphMaster · · Score: 1

    Indeed. Pretty graphics only get you so far.

    --
    Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
  53. Re:oh good by Teun · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I can't really name any other desktop with a versatility and usefulness better than KDE.

    Sure a DE is an acquired taste but it does have to be functional without being ugly.
    Nor is there outside the commercial offerings any DE with such a well integrated package of applications.

    That doesn't mean I don't see the attractivity of something like Enlightenment but compared to KDE it is seriously limited, both in options and looks.

    --
    "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
  54. Re:I've been using Wayland and systemd for nearly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Jolla phone has much better hardware than the N9. And X11 on N9 is GPU-accelerated as well. Why do you think Wayland has anything to do with it?

  55. Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yes, but that just makes you a luddite and doesnt really say anyting about the UI

  56. Re:oh good by AntiSol · · Score: 2

    Or maybe he's somebody who:
    * cares about real-estate on his screen and the density of information displayed vs shininess. Those borders and "modern" task bar are huge!
    * is interested in having a UI that responds in a timely manner rather than having pretty but utterly useless animations that make him wait half a second every time he clicks on something.
    * wants to use less memory for caching pretty animations and more for the programs he's running
    * wants his processor to be working on the task he has assigned it rather than showing him shiny animations
    * feels like it's more important to make something stable than pretty
    * feels like it's more important to make something efficient than pretty
    * feels like it's more important to make something compatible than pretty

  57. Re:oh good by epyT-R · · Score: 1

    Win32 GDI? You mean like metro? At least kde is more usable than that. If you mean the win2k desktop, you might have a point there, but kde can be configured to mimic that.

  58. I don't think you know what "refuted" means by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 1

    "Refuted" doesn't mean that someone disagrees. "Refuted" means that someone has conclusively proved that something is incorrect.

  59. Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think that sums up KDE4 in a single sentence.

  60. Re:oh good by brockmcnuggets · · Score: 2

    I had not used KDE in some time and worked with it recently. I was amazingly disappointed. Here are some of the things I found: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... I was stunned at how bad it was and have been actively adding bug reports to let the developers know. There are literally dozens that I show though. It is pretty inexcusable.

  61. Re:oh good by brockmcnuggets · · Score: 1

    Ah, thank you! I did not see you post this before I posted a link to the channel. KDE really is quite a mess.

  62. Re:oh good by brockmcnuggets · · Score: 1

    Thanks for checking: 1: What version? Not fixed on the desktop on 4.11.5. 2: Ditto. 3: Reported, including my suggestion for improvement with a mockup for a new dialog. 4: On the desktop? Reported but still listed as "Unconfirmed". 5: Tied to desktop actions being different - a KIO bug 6: Really? What version and what distro? I have been told by others Mint does not do it as the default. Seems confusing to be able to tell someone to use "delete" and have it be move to trash or delete immediately. The menu item, I think, should be "Delete Immediately" and should not have a warning that is so easy to turn off perhaps should only show with shift-key held down. 7: Again, what version and distro? 8: I will make sure to report it 9: Reported. For reports see: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.c...

  63. Re:oh good by brockmcnuggets · · Score: 1

    I think the delete situation could be much improved by calling the menu item "Delete Immediately". You now have no more name collision with "Delete". Also show that option only when shift is held down or make it harder to accidentally get rid of the warning dialog.

  64. Re:trolololol overrated. by Nexus7 · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't consider myself a KDE fanboy, having used it only for oh, like 3 years but I moved to it after some of that Unity/Gnome2/Gnome3/I-forget-the-details mess. Suddenly I found I could tweak things to my preference (nothing fanboyish, just being able to turn on editable paths, different views, etc. in the file explorer; a searchable "Start" button). I did find the default appearance ugly, but customized it (KFaenza icon-set, Smaragd window theme engine-thingy that lets me use a really nice Emerald window theme called HUD). I also use Windows everyday, and much prefer KDE. Yeah, some things don't work well - Wally breaks frequently because KDE makes it hard to change the wallapaper from the cmd line, Samba mounts ask for passwords repeatedly... but those are things that either aren't possible in Windows (or Unity, I suppose, I never looked back at that one), or well, they work in Windows (but other things drive my preference towards KDE).

  65. Re:oh good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And eat ice cream.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erh2ngRZxs0

  66. the Kompany gives a fuck? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And the Kompany should give a fuck about Canonical or anything Canonical does?

    Canonical at best treats KDE as a second class citizen.

  67. Re:oh good by FirephoxRising · · Score: 1

    Really, I think W8 looks flat, old and ugly.

  68. Re:oh good by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    One personal gripe I'd like to add is that, when copying files to memory stick and the operation finishes, the "finished" notification displays the name of only one of the files (the last one?). This creates a bit of confusion -- "was only one file copied?"

  69. Typical Canoncial by thatkid_2002 · · Score: 1

    Equal parts incompetent and arrogant. They're like a fledgeling Microsoft, except now everybody else is moving on from yesteryear and won't waste time indulging such foolishness anymore.

  70. Re:oh good by Barsteward · · Score: 1

    " that wont get the FUCK out of the way," - explain what that means. i see this comment about all DEs to "trash" them

    --
    "The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
  71. Re:I've been using Wayland and systemd for nearly by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

    Wayland allows the kinds of GPU-accelerated and compositing-oriented display that allow for what people are increasingly used to from other OSes

    No, it doesn't. That's nothing to do with Wayland at all. Wayland is just a compositor that allows you to manage pixel buffers (and when they are ready) and input devices.

    Any hardware GPU accelerated stuff is supported by OpenGL or other parts of the stack, just like on Xorg.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  72. oh slashdot by allo · · Score: 1

    Why aren't you linking to the blogpost, instead of the article quoting the blogpost?

  73. It is the other way around by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The display server really matters; everybody uses one.

    The stuff on top of the display server (KDE, Gnome, ...) matters less, that is the interchangeable stuff. Some likes a "desktop environment" and uses KDE. Nice for beginners and all that. Some are different and go for gnome. Some goes for speed and ditch all that - relying on a simple window manager and no "desktop" at at all. Experts launch their apps from the xterm's they have up all the time anyway. Typing is so much faster than mousing around when you know the commands well.

    But they all use a display server. Real terminals are a bit restricted...

  74. Re: "low footprint devices" by billstewart · · Score: 1

    The first platforms I used with X Windows were a Sun-3 and a 386/25, usually with about 4MB of RAM (some of our Sun boxes had 8MB, and if you wanted to use NeWS instead of X you definitely needed 8. It's possible that the 386 had less RAM than that.)

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  75. Duplication is good by ThePhilips · · Score: 1

    Aaron also raised the problem which the larger Free Software community is trying to fix – reduce duplication of work.

    Part of why Linux (IMO) succeeded was the duplication.

    Because if you carefully evaluate the duplication, lots of it is not really duplication - but it is the choices, we are free to make.

    Take away the "duplication" and you end up with something close-minded as Java, Windows or Mac OS.

    The only "negative" of the duplication I have seen so far is the hurt ego of the competing developers.

    The Linux desktop is more consistent and coherent today than it ever has been as a result, from icon themes to clipboards to compatibility between window managers to IPC to application notifications to application launching to multimedia to ...

    The consistency was achieved not because we have single implementation - but because everybody has agreed what should be inside the implementation! Without previous duplication, without seeing the flipside of different design choices, reaching agreement wouldn't have been possible!

    I work for commercial ISV. Believe me when I'm saying you from a decade of practical experience that "no duplication" doesn't mean "consistency" or "ease of development". Very very often decisions are rushed for marketing reasons and developers are stuck for years with a "committee design" nobody can change because nobody knows alternatives because we do not allow duplication.

    --
    All hope abandon ye who enter here.