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Wayland 1.5 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Wayland 1.5 has been released, along with Weston Compositor 1.5. Wayland/Weston 1.5 carry many new user features, with a new libinput back-end, XWayland support, a full-screen shell, and many other changes. This release is particularly important as Fedora 21 will run on GNOME Wayland and X.Org Server 1.16 will be released this summer with integrated XWayland support."
Wayland and its never-ending stream of stories seems to be going the way pulseaudio did. It's heavily criticized, cuts down some features or is somehow buggy, but seems to give many users what they want, or at least that's what all these crazy stories point to.
As long as I can still run X atop Wayland, I don't really care. I loved pulseaudio when it was being bashed already. Maybe I'll love Wayland too? Has anyone here actually seriously tried this thing before bashing it?
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
So it will be more widely adopted and as such have a more unified troubleshooting across different DE's. Or maybe that's just me distro/DE hopping.
I hate FPs like this - Yes, enough that I feel a need to complain about them in the discussion instead of just moving on.
I use Linux. I've rolled my own kernels (as in actually writing code, not just a custom config and build of the stock tree). And I have never heard of Wayland or Weston. And out of three links, could you have included one going to "what the hell is Wayland"? No. You have a release announcement and a PR page.
Wayland may well rock the world. But when writing up an FP about something obscure (yes, it is - I don't care how many of your friends run it), you would do well to link to an intro-to-obscure-thing page.
Just sayin'.
How many stories is Slashdot going to run about Wayland before it's actually a viable product? Apparently it's already up to version 1.5 and it's still not there...
Wayland is nothing until there is good remote display support.
Right now they're all stinking piles of dog crap. Eventually one of them will stop being dog crap, at which point I would like to know about it. Maybe it'll be Berlin. I hear lots of good things about Berlin on Slashdot.
This steady stream of "Wayland 1.X released; it's still dog crap" just makes me think it's vaporware.
This one looks almost, kinda-sorta useful and on its way to more adoption. This is obviously bad and against everything we stand for! I'm starting up a new WaylandX project on github (https://github.com/waylandx) to build a better one of these. Come and join me!
What's the problem with VNC ?
a fuck was given
Does anyone know if Wayland has the nice dual clipboard system like X? Or are we going to be stuck with something hideously primitive like other well known operaing systems?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And like it or not, X DOES need to be replaced. ASAP. Technical users who need all it's (hacked in) functions can stick to X, but the general public just needs a smoother, faster, less buggy solution.
Replacing X with Wayland will solve very few real problems, and it will almost certainly create some (remember the pulseaudio and systemd hype before they were actually forced on users by all major distributions ?). Wayland cannot possibly solve problems like these listed below, simply because they are not in X:
- poorly written, buggy, slow, and outdated (in terms of API version compatibility) OpenGL drivers - that is, basically everything other than the Nvidia proprietary driver
- bloated, slow, and buggy - but unfortunately widely used - GUI toolkits
- bloated, slow, and buggy applications
- desktop environments and window managers with the same flaws as above
User-unfriendly configuration and bad (or non-existent) documentation will likely also continue to be issues, as they tend to be with open source software, since they are a low priority for programmers who mainly code for themselves, rather than as a real job. To summarize, games will continue to perform notably worse than on WIndows/Direct3D, KDE and GNOME will still suck in all their usual ways, major Linux desktop applications will still continue to be inferior to their Windows counterparts, and users will still end up having to hack configuration files when things (not uncommonly) go wrong. There will just be some additional PITA related to migrating from one windowing system that works to another.
The cases where people have argued such a thing are the strawman you've taken up on as streaming bitmaps, which is not always (in fact very rarely outside of gnome3) the case. So there's equivalent performance (streaming bitmaps the same speed in both) or better when you have a situation where one can do something other than just stream bitmaps. Of course every time this gets mentioned we get the "only dinosaurs want remote access/shaped windows/whatever feature of X does not apply on phones - then the distraction - hey look how slow gedit starts on X so obviously X is crap and not gedit" so this discussion usually ends up at a dead end.
We've already got VNC and Wayland is not planning anything better remotely so we may as well focus on what it gives us as a local framebuffer, then screenscrape as best as we can later. With a dumb framebuffer the plan is to trade complexity and flexibility for speed.
To me that sounds like complete and utter bullshit unless gvim is now seriously broken. In my workplace complex interactive geophysical packages with a lot of graphical information are used remotely over X by dozens of people at once to (in some cases) substandard MS Windows implementations of X without running like a dog - even over wireless to laptops, so how is your gvim over GigE example even possible unless somethign else is going on? It appears to fail the reality test. Did you make it up or was the machine you were running it on under very heavy load at the time so it would be slow in all cases? If you made it up - why - what is motivating you to make such things up about what you see as opposition instead of praising what you see as good in Wayland? This X sux rubbish that fails the reality test is annoying and doesn't do Wayland any good while Wayland is still making progress.
No, what IS news is self-righteous experts wanting a feature they don't use while not knowing an equivalent feature has already been merged into the compositor. I mean fuck it's not like there was a Slashdot notice about remote desktop support being added to Weston last year sometime. Oh wait ....
Please take your bitching elsewhere.
No? Then stop spamming slashdot with this "news". It's not news until there's working network transparency.
Well, it happens to have network transparency already, so I guess that's a green light to continue spamming with Wayland news.
I'll tell you what *would* be news - if someone posted an actual legitimate use-case for a network-transparent desktop app that wasn't a bodge to get around some archaic CAM app that management would probably replace if your time was actually worth anything.
That's nice but what you describe is for GTK3, and not GTK2. Seems like the latter is still used a lot, and frankly GTK3 has gone rogue, deleting features, adding ones only Gnome developers will use etc.
Developers of applications run away from it and migrations from GTK2 to GTK3 seldom made (though there are dual mode GTK2/GTK3 applications where you can select the UI).
Recently with GTK 3.10 they removed icons in menus and the highlighting of letters to help you with keyboard navigation (e.g. Alt-F opens File menu). It's the Slashdot Beta of the toolkit world.
I can't understand why network transparency is something SO important, especially when a lot of ugly hacks are necessary to make it work and compromising the performance of much more important parts like the presentation of local desktop.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
xload! xload xload xload! I R serious admin and i need ze lxoad
So use VNC if you need a remote display. This need to keep 30 year old features unchanged has got to stop. 99% of the people using the GUI are running it locally.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
It's not. People heard the fancy term "transparency" and went oooooooh I'll use that without realising that network transparency does not mean the ability to display an app on a remote desktop. The same people also think that the very specific term "network transparency" which has a very specific meaning still applies. It doesn't. Most Linux desktops have lacked network transparency since the mid 90s in favour of nasty fallback hacks and rendering in different ways depending on the target server.
Modern X11 over the network is nothing more than a slower implementation of something like VNC except it doesn't support even basic things like compression. It is one of the worst performing remote desktop solutions there is.
Because this is Slashdot, and people always need something to complain. Wayland will be clean, fast, and, more important, maintenainble. But, OMG, if it don't offer remote desktop in its bones, it'll be crap.
The most common use case today is local applications. This must be optimised for. Have a separate server and protocol to network transparency for the classes of applications that network transparency is useful for (simple GUIs, text editors and suchlike, rather than nonlinear video editors and 3D games). Likewise with audio, there is a need for a simple high performance backend for some applications, and network friendliness for others. In both cases there should be two layers, a fast light low level backend and a network transparent application layer for applications that want to use it.
John_Chalisque
I can't understand why network transparency is something SO important, especially when a lot of ugly hacks are necessary to make it work and compromising the performance of much more important parts like the presentation of local desktop.
Probably because you're a retard who just uses Linux to watch Youtube kitten videos.
Right here on my desktop, I have two copies of Eclipse running from a VM using X forwarding, because that VM runs the old version of Linux that our old servers have been using for five years, while my development machine runs the new version that our new servers run. Do you really think I want to do that via some crappy VNC crap that has to resend half the screen every time I scroll down a line?
Why, oh, why are the Shiny Kids so desperate to remove the features that have made Linux a much less crappy OS than Windows?
It's because the Shiny Kids are smarter than you. They recognise that the solution to your problem is to make it so you don't have to run 2 different versions of your IDE, rather than lug a load of X11 legacy bullshit around for decades so you you can continue with your bodged-up edge use-cases.
Most Linux desktops have lacked network transparency since the mid 90s in favour of nasty fallback hacks and rendering in different ways depending on the target server.
Nope. I've used Linux desktops since the 90s with X clients running on numerous platforms. Many of which were developed not even knowing what Linux was. So the need for server specific 'hacks' could never have been satisfied. And Linux works just fine, thanks.
Have gnu, will travel.
Let me see... At least for me, the big problem with the network transparency is that to get it working, the X server needs to follow a number of architectural decisions that are highly detrimental to the performance of a local desktop and you can not work around this without a lot of (broken or unstable) hacks. That said, how many users use the transparency and how many users needs an efficient local desktop? Why I should hurt the performance of the entire server to meet a situation that is used for only 2% of the total userbase?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
This is slashdot, it assumes (correctly) a certain level of knowledge. If you don't know what Wayland is, get off your ass and search google.
The only major engineering fault with X11 is that the X server is a Single Point of Failure --- whenever it hangs or dies, which is not uncommon owing to the unstable state of graphics card drivers, all your running X11 applications collapse and terminate, often many hundreds of them at once on a powerful destop.
X11 badly needed redesign or replacement to eliminate this SPoF. Did the Wayland team make avoiding this single most important X11 design fault a priority for their X11 replacement? Of course not. Their eyes are not on the need for robust engineering, but entirely on eye candy.
A huge opportunity for improving the engineering quality of FOSS graphic systems has been missed.
This is VERY good news for people who want a video-accelerated gui on their Raspberry Pi. Wayland supports the video chipset on it - wheras X does not (and is horribly slow!)
Ah, the "X11 is not network transparent anymore" FUD. How is this moderated insightful? I use it everyday - between different machines with different versions of UNIX or Linux and it just works. People want to break this for no good reason, and this is really really sad.
And yes, applications which do not use direct rendering (i.e. 99%) do render in exactly the same way (using XRender).
People want to break this for no good reason,
Oh, they've got a good reason. Marketing wants to reduce the expectations of the users. 20 years ago, I could run video over networked X and run a remote CATIA session on my Linux desktop. So why can't you run your precious Auotocad or Adobe suite apps over X? Per seat licenses.
20 years ago, when Microsoft was a joke in the engineering world, things worked fine. And then they (and other vendors, no fair picking on only MS) tried to convince management that every seat needed an office productivity suite. Some poor slobs ended up with two systems on their desk, or dual booted Windows/Linux. And then our IT department got smart. Citrix offered a product that could export a Windows session from an NT server as an X client. So the few times I needed to run Word or Excel, I could just start a Windows desktop as a single client on my Linux system. Our IT people loved it. MS systems could be administrated at the central server location. Management loved it. For most of us (~5000 engineers) aproximately 1 license was needed per 10 people. But Microsoft (and others) shit themselves because it cut into their sales.
For all the persuasion end users are getting to go Wayland, multiply that by 10 to see the pressure app developers will be under to drop X and go with the local only solution. One license per seat. And once X is forgotten about, management won't have an example to hold up and ask why vernors can't come up with a more cost effective solution.
For most of the neck-beards playing video games in their parents' basement, it doesn't matter. But this is where I think Linux distros need to fork and provide one platform for the kiddies and one for business.
Have gnu, will travel.
What's funny is we've been slowly getting into a situation where all PC are fast so we can afford the waste of using X even more.
On the other hand we're now down to three graphics vendors and the drivers are improving.. but at lot of time using the GPU for the GUI will result in less stability, potential overheating or lock up, and instead of Xorg using your CPU it will be a graphics driver and its OpenGL implementation.
All so that a fraction of the userbase can look at windows flying around and zooming in/out etc.
I don't want to buy a new graphics card to read text, view movies and play minesweeper.
And Linux works just fine, thanks.
For you. Didn't you hear? Last year was the year of Linux on desktop, and it doesn't work very well. If open source is to compete with proprietary then you need to actually provide functionality that users want. You know really complicated edge case crap like plugging in a projector and expecting it to work out of the box.
Well it's not. As said network transparent has a specific meaning. You use it every day? So do I. But I'm under no delusions that the application is entirely transparent to the system its rendered on. Mind you it still just works, and it's quite right for you to expect it to just work in the future under Wayland.
But if it "just works" why would you care about the details of how the protocol works?
As for no good reason. You really should try some other form of remote application. There is a very good reason to do something differently from the slow archaic way that X11 does. Thinking otherwise is simply ignorance, accidental or willful.
I managed to compile and install it . But I can't find instructions of how to run it. I was thinking I should shutdown the dm and then start it somehow. Release 1.5 looks like a production name, am I missing something ? Any links to the docs or howtos ?
If the idiots take network transparency away from us, the only realistic option we'll have left is the even slower and totally ridiculous web app paradigm (yes, it truly is ridiculous - it's ten levels of hacks just to keep a bit of state on top of a stateless protocol).
My theory is that now that Microsoft screwed the pooch with the latest Windows, all the Windows weenies who no longer have a usable system are coming over to Linux wanting to recreate what they lost. It's an invasion of the barbarians, basically.
Wrong, you NEED to care. Because the best way to do work on a desktop is still the old-fashioned local application, ideally with old-style compiled aplications. Truth, you have to go through the step of install the application locally on the desktop, but in return you have all the resources you need at the maximum speed that the hardware is capable, without lags caused by bad connections (connections available 100% of the time and gigabit speed only exist in the first world, not here) or bloatware caused by a crapload of hacks to turn HTML into a "desktop".
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time