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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?
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'.
Oddly enough X gets along fine with crap remote display support.
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.
Well windows has Remote Desktop (RDP), but I think that supports your point. I use xrdp for remote gui connects to my linux boxes as it performs a hell of a lot better than X, which is unusable on anything except a local LAN.
Yeah, I mean, X forwarding is one of those things that you very rarely need, and when you do, it either doesn't work at all because [inexplicable reasons that can't be fixed without admin on a machine you don't own or having to restart a machine that's 200 miles away], or it sort of works but makes you wish it didn't because it's too slow/glitchy. Typically ssh does the trick, sometimes combined with forwarding gnome-open to view images/pdfs/whatever (which is terrible due to the aforementioned reasons), because scp'ing every time is even more painful. All my needs would be perfectly satisfied with something that combined ssh for some cli, and some kind of automated easy to set up and disable file updating utility (like dropbox without the third party server). Since I only ever need this stuff once in a blue moon ad hoc, setting up svn or something like that is just overkill. Example -- I want to run some code on a remote machine that plots a figure or pdflatex's some file and quickly view the output, without downloading a copy of all the code/data. I have yet to find a way to do this that isn't extremely awkward...
weinersmith
[scnr]
And how often do you need to watch youtube on a remote desktop when administering a remote computer?
That brings me back to the second sentence in my post.
"I personally make a distinction between "using" and "administering" a machine,..."
Did you even read the post at all? Obviously, you are talking about administering a system. But I can guarantee that I am not administering a system while I sit here wasting time posting crap on Slashdot, and I have this funny feeling you're not either.
BT Sync? http://www.bittorrent.com/sync
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Huh, that's actually pretty interesting. Thanks for the link.
weinersmith
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.
The Wayland protocol will never have remote display support.
The compositor on the other hand already has it. I find it funny that Slashdot users don't understand this given how the article about it was posted on slashdot.
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.
And what if a particular program has no command-line version, or the command-line version sucks and is extremely limited (e.g. running a MATLAB instance on a remote cluster)?
I don't know if you're serious or not but if you're serious you should know that no one enjoys using slow, crappy remote desktops when there is a choice. The problem is that we often have no choice.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
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.
Wayland is nothing until there is good remote display support.
There is already remote desktop support in Wayland. It uses RDP and works for individual windows too.
Using remote desktop is the practical solution for his problem.
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.
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.
A long VGA cable run could be nicer, or these days there's beaming of HDMI on CAT6 for a bit more investment.
True. If the machine is in the same office, those might be viable options too.
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
It's not that bad once you get used to it. What you now see as random characters falling on the screen will soon become something you'd recognize like that hot blonde in the smoking red dress walking down the crowded sidewalk.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Nomachine (NX) removed a lot of the pain that I had with X over VPN. I used it several years ago on a project and the performance was such that I barely noticed that I wasn't on the host's LAN. I liked it better than VNC at the time because I was still allowed to open a single X window without having to put up with an entire remote desktop.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
I have not done any testing.
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
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
I tried using it with the freeRDP client
can you point to the Wayland mailing list thread you posted about this? I'm not being [merely] snarky - I want to know if the developers helped identify the problem or not.
Per-window RDP is OK by me and then I'll tell everybody like the GP to shut it and complain about something else. But if it's just checked-in-but-broken then that's a different story.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
I personally do on occasion. I sometimes run R on an EC2 instance to be able to use a beefy box and use it remotely from a device of my choice. I don't think that's a particularly odd use case for the types of people that use X today. If Weyland/Weston are not targeting those people, then so be it. If they are, then the remote display use-cases are going to suffer.
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 tried this on my bosses mac but couldn't wind the 'win' key - can you help?
I like some of the changes you 've made, but I disagree with your philosophy of standing for things. Due to this, I'm starting up a new WaylandX-ex ((https://github.com/waylandx) project on github to avoid these political issues. Join me instead!
You might be interested in this podcast if I'm reading your post right... they talk quite a bit about using js-git to mount GitHub repositories as file systems, so that you can mount a repository, copy files into it and then run a commit and have the stuff you've copied automagically pushed to GitHub.
It's certainly interesting stuff even if possibly overkill :)
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 ?
> Have fun watching YouTube in Lynx.
Have fun with youtube via x-forwarding.
shouldn't such tools have some kind of client-server model?
shouldn't such tools have some kind of client-server model?
They do. Hopefully Weyland/Weston will as well and hopefully it will work as good or better than the solution we have today.
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
i speak about a client-server model of having the gui here, and the server doing the work there, not about having the compositor here and the gui there.
for example have a look at mysql-workbench. You have a nice gui. on your pc. It connects via tcp or tcp-via-ssh to your server, where the db is running. nobody wants to have this program running on the server, forwarded via X11, rdp, NX or VNC.
so, mysql has the client-server model? What about having something like this for R and the display of its charts?
There's no reason we couldn't have both. If the application developer does want to provide their own protocol and a thick client and all that, that's great. That doesn't mean the display layer should not have a network layer to allow remote displays. They solve different problems and are useful in different situations.
jep, thats okay. But i think a thick client is more suitable for many tasks, especially where the server part runs as privilgeded user.