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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."
>> As long as I can still run X atop Wayland, I don't really care.
If I can't get the applications I want as X apps anymore because everything has moved to Wayland but Wayland still doesn't support remote display then I will care deeply.
Oddly enough X gets along fine with crap remote display support.
It's highly likely that Wayland's remote display will beat X. Virtually none of the features (remote drawing) that X provided over the network are used today (line/polygon drawing) and tool kits like Qt/GTK+ have you shipping framebuffers across the network, something built around manipulating frame buffers should be able to stream them over the network, individually, to a compositor on your system.
You're right. That's why nobody uses Windows or OSX.
weinersmith
Have fun watching YouTube in Lynx.
I personally make a distinction between "using" and "administering" a machine, and as a user, I tend to run X11 (these days often with a tiling window manager). When I want to perform some administrative tasks, I'll often just run a terminal emulator within that environment. Face it, while great for many things, the command line--especially in its raw, no-X11 form, is pretty limited in many areas from the point of view of a typical user.
Don't get me wrong though; I'll often use wget instead of Firefox to download files, do basic file system operations in a terminal, even play an occasional podcast in mplayer. But really, it is not optimal to use the CLI 100% for everyday use for semi-normal people.
And Wayland remote display is going to happen when, exactly? Is it on the roadmap? I'm asking seriously -- if there is a roadmap, point me to it, I don't follow Wayland devopment outside of the occasional rant-fests on Slashdot like we are having now.
There are certain environments where remote display is the *only* display, so if Wayland doesn't have it, Wayland doesn't go into those environments.
First, why are you using a GUI in such a situation?
Robots don't have displays. It's really difficult to get your work done if your monitor keeps skittering away across the lab. Visualization tools for various pieces of robot state are much better than text dumps -- not surprisingly. Display across the WiFi network is a requirement. Also, all the generic basic tools need to run in a headless environment.
But robots aren't the only embedded environment where Linux is popular. Again, with those it is nice to be able to display to a large monitor for development work, even though the device might have a small display of it's own.
Second, X11 is not going away immediately, and no one expects it to. Qt and GTK+ will remain compatible with X11 for some time to come precisely because of this. And you'll still be able to access those remote X applications via XWayland.
And that is what we will no doubt do when the time comes.
Slashdot is not "news for the Linux world," and even if it was, not everyone in "Linux world" is so deeply involved as to keep up to date on every developing piece of software.
All a summary writer has to do is drop in a brief, casual couple of words about what (roughly) it is, and those who need informing are slightly better informed, while those who are already informed don't notice and aren't offended.
Ever notice how the BBC will often refer to "US President Barack Obama," or drop in a reference to the team a famous footballer player plays for, even though one would think those would both be widely known facts among the readership of such articles? Chances are, you didn't notice and didn't care.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No one is asking for feature refunds. They are simply bitching about users who demand every piece of software be 100% feature complete the moment it's first alpha team is announced and then continue to spew crap about it long through the development process.
Yes Firefox has abandoned geeks in favour of more simple users, well guess what there are many other packages out there that de-crappify the interface. Funnily enough that is EXACTLY the stance Wayland developers have taken from the very start. Design a flexible light weight modern protocol that does away with X's cruft and offloads stuff to the client. The users demand remote. Well if it matters that much to that many then the compositor can be written to support that. That is the flexibility that is missing from X.
The attitude was fine early on, but seeing every other bloody post on slashdot spewing the same crap, even after the Wayland team have announced remote desktop is possible, and even after the Wayland team have demonstrated code that does that, what do you think the answer is going to be?
I've had to remote Firefox too,
You're doing it wrong! Just set up an ssh tunnel and tell firefox to use it as sock proxy. This works seamlessly
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
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.