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."

Comments

Re:Clipboards?

[serviscope_minor]

You seem to be all for the X11 side of things. Yes it's well specified and there are many benefits.

Yes, but I restricted myself to only talking about the anti-X FUD.

Such as that it's so well specified that things like the volume keys on the keyboard can't be passed onto a music player because the laptop lid is closed and the lockscreen is fullscreen and the way X works means that any fullscreen program completely monopolises the input system?

Works for me (TM). It's set up that my WM does stuff when the volume keys are pressed. It must have a grab on those keys because it always works, lid closed or not.

Actually, this is another piece of FUD which has been floating around: wayland is better because the WM/screensaver interaction on X is crap but in Wayland, the idea is to have the compositor do that. Well, there's nothing in X that stops one having the WM run the screensaver directly, and there's nothing in Wayland that stops one having the screensaver being separate.

Yes I'm all for specification, but if network systems were specified the same way as the X11 protocol then we wouldn't have 7 layers, everything would be TCP with fixed sized headers and one port on the other end, and you could kiss most of the flexibility of the network aside.

Uh, TCP headers ARE fixed length. You're beginning sound like one of the FUDdy types because you've moved seamlessly from a legitimate complaint into random bashing. And well specified doesn't mean inflexible. Your anti-example of TCP(/IP) is in fact extremely well specified to the point where many independent implementations seamlessly interoperate, yet it is very flexible.

What Wayland is trying to achieve is exactly the opposite. Make a display system by specifying the absolute minimum and leaving the client the flexibility to implement the remaining features as it sees fit.

So the idea is that Wayland merely provides the mechanism allowing things to be done, but not the policy on how specifically to do them?

This is a bad thing if you want 100% certainty of functionality however limited it may be or interoperability, however it's fantastic for systems where requirements change as technology advances, such as the desktop.

I'm not sure I follow but it sounds like you're saying that Wayland is sacraficing interoperability for rapidly chasing the latest things? That sounds like a massively dumbass idea (imagine a system where GUI programs didn't interoperate! It would be like taking the desktop back to 1995, or using Android). I also don't believe that's the case with Wayland. At least I hope not.