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

Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Jorl17]

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?

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[morgauxo]

>> 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.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Microlith]

Wayland is critically important, which is why (unlike Pulseaudio) it hasn't already been rolled out yet. Qt has integrated it, Gnome has, KDE is porting KWin to implement it. There have been fairly few technical criticisms, the only one I've seen made with any muster has been network transparency - but even that could be solved rather easily given the way Wayland works with framebuffers.

On the flip side, Xorg has you dragging around unused cruft and the way it interfaces with the kernel forces some possible security holes be left open, holes that Wayland will fix.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Microlith]

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.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Microlith]

Wayland will never support remote display because that's not not it works.

Wayland does not work over a network inherently, but there's no reason you couldn't forward the buffers over the network and have them composited remotely.

Someone could write a compositor that does the job, but the best anyone has come up with is VNC... ...which, IMHO, makes X11 look like a snappy protocol.

Except that X11 over the network with any modern toolkit is already effectively forcing X11 to do what Wayland will do - only X11 does it badly and without compression. And VNC sucks because it has to poll the whole desktop - Wayland could forward individual applications.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[dbc]

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.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Microlith]

Basically all that. Even over GigE simple things like gvim are a dog.

If I can stream a game from my desktop to a tablet and play it with virtually no latency, on Windows it should be possible for something implementing Wayland to stream individual application frame buffers across a network effortlessly - hell, it could do it with applications that are live on a remote screen and keep them alive if the remote server disconnects, something that always annoyed me.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Anonymous Coward]

This might be useful.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/04/03/1219239/remote-desktop-backend-merged-into-wayland

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Anonymous Coward]

not any time soon.
Problem is not with Wayland.
Problem is with NVIDIA binary drivers. They simply have no support of it and are rather in very initial stage of Wayland compatibility development. AMD open source drivers also suck at the moment when it comes to many aspects. So there is long road ahead.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Tailhook]

RDP protocol support was merged into Wayland over a year ago. Wayland's original developer prototyped a remote display implementation almost two years go, before 1.0 was released. This is in addition to XWayland already providing an X server to host legacy X apps.

Wayland will have good remote display. The peanut gallery rant-fests around here not withstanding.

Anyhow. Now you know. If I'm wrong get a refund.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[dbc]

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.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[bluegutang]

Anyhow. Now you know. If I'm wrong get a refund.

While I think Wayland remote display will end up working just fine, "get a refund" is exactly the wrong attitude, and one that is doing a great deal to hold back open source. Don't like your Firefox buttons switching places every two weeks? Get a refund. Unity's window management for retards driving you up a wall? Get a refund. Newest GNOME version missing half the features you depend on? Get a refund. Guess what? Nobody is going to ask for a refund. They are going to switch to a different piece of software. And if every open source application has been trashed by developers, they'll switch to closed source.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[boristhespider]

I've had to remote Firefox too, chiefly to access papers that are behind paywalls my university has access to but I have no access to at a university I'm visiting, or at home. You're making Firefox over X sound a lot better than it actually is.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[GauteL]

If the app is built on top of GTK+ (I assume Qt is the same?), the app will support both and the backend will be selected at runtime.

I.e. GDK_BACKEND will be wayland by default, but if you log in via ssh and set X forwarding, it can be set to "X11". It should be completely seamless.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I'm using Motif and tcl/tk over tunnelled X every day you insensitive clod.

And when I do have to use a bling app, 'ssh -CX' generally tames the beast, even web browsers with horribly inefficient and unwanted fade in - fade out effects.

Check out some supercomputer cluster management software some time. Bling doesn't matter one iota. Having the damn thing do its job matters.

grumble grumble lawn grumble grumble hipsters grumble grumble cold dead hands.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[DrXym]

There is already a reference RDP implementation in Weston. So to answer your question, it's happened already.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[DrXym]

Wayland is the protocol that clients talk with the compositor, not the compositor itself. The reference compositor Weston already implements an RDP server and does so in a remarkably small amount of source code.

As for it's performance, it will be no worse than X (or Xvnc) on modern apps because as everyone has stated, most modern apps are pushing pixmaps around anyway. If anything performance has the potential to be better because the remoting protocol can be asynchronous (unlike X) and the server doesn't have a handful of X and extensions processes with all their context switches to worry about.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[thegarbz]

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?

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[Beck_Neard]

I've built a few open source projects and been heavily criticized for my design choices but you know what? I agree with this. A lot of developers are too stubborn to make changes and it drives people away then they wonder why no one is using their project anymore.

But the flipside is true too. A lot of the time 'flaws' are actually sober and sane design choices which you have to get into the internals of the system to understand. People often don't get this and then bitch and moan about why something hasn't been done the way they like.

The Wayland devs seem pretty sober and sane so far, and I think they've made a lot of nice design choices. The problem of displaying graphics on a PC is an inherently ugly problem (and X is an ugly piece of software which visibly reflects that). If they can make it just a little bit better, it will be worth the wait, in my opinion.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[paulatz]

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

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[TheRaven64]

Multi-second lag on X sounds like misuse of the protocol. Unfortunately, this is largely the fault of Xlib. The X11 protocol was carefully designed to be asynchronous, but then they wrapped the whole thin in a synchronous C API. This means that you end up sending a small amount of data to the server then blocking while you wait for the reply. Used correctly, you'd send all of the display updates sequentially, get the updates as the arrive, and later handle any errors that appear. Similarly, input events would be handled as they arrived, rather than synchronising everything. Unfortunately, although XCB fixes this, most toolkits are designed around the synchronous model so they don't really take advantage of it.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[DrXym]

Quite obviously yes.

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[jones_supa]

Nothing is obvious in open source. :D

2 years later: "Yeah, Wayland has RDP support... But it's kind of broken and buggy. It requires these patches to be applied, manual creation of this 1000-line configuration file, and the sessions have always to be started from command line. Also, you have to use this certain distro. We are waiting it to be fixed, but the component has insufficient manpower and resources for the task to ever be actually completed anyway. Just use VNC, sigh..."

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[AC-x]

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.

For this use case wouldn't it be a lot more appropriate to stream raw data from the robot to software running on a desktop machine to represent it visually? Surely it's a waste of CPU effort drawing a GUI on the robot itself?

Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[DrXym]

It's a reference implementation, a proof of concept to demonstrate to people complaining that yes wayland can in fact be remoted assuming a compositor provides with the support. It's not wayland's job to do the remoting, it's the compositor's. I see no reason to think that once wayland is switched on by default in a dist or two that compositors will explicitly support remoting, or there will be dedicated compositors for that purpose.

Re: Will it really go the pulseaudio way?

[BitwizeGHC]

Remote display on Wayland will be much better and more modular than X11. X11 mandates a chatty, slow, obsolete protocol for remote display and applications MUST be network-aware. With Wayland, you can run a compositor on the remote server that doesn't display its clients on the screen but rather transmits streaming video of the clients back to a Wayland client on your desktop which decodes and displays these streams. And neither your local Wayland compositor nor the remote clients need be network aware.

X11 is morbidly obsolete.

Re:I hate FPs like this.

[nighty5]

I don't write Linux code, but even I know what Wayland is.

Re:Wayland is nothing until

[blackpaw]

Oddly enough X gets along fine with crap remote display support.

Re:Wayland is nothing until

[martas]

You're right. That's why nobody uses Windows or OSX.

Re:Wayland is nothing until

[UltraZelda64]

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.

Re:Wayland is nothing until

[blackpaw]

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.

Clipboards?

[serviscope_minor]

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?

Re:Clipboards?

[serviscope_minor]

Clipboard? It's a framebuffer with a compositor on top. Clipboards are a client problem (as are many other things).

Well, no, it's not. It's also a keyboard and mouse input system.

It also deals with copy and paste and drag and drop:

http://lwn.net/Articles/491509...

Because it's a windowing system and it turns out that just a compositor alone isn't enough (who knew, eh?). It's also interesting. Apparently Wayland implements passing of data by just passing a file descriptor, apparently instead of reimplementing 10 pages of ICCCM grot. The thing about the 10 pages of ICCCM grot is it's really REALLY well specified and a random person from the internet can come along, read the ICCCM, grok it (yes, I have actually implemented copy/paste and XDnD from the specs) and get it working. It's not that hard.

The wayland one seems poorly specified by comparison. For example they don't specify teeny-tiny details liekl whether the FD must be seekable, for example. So, do you have to write a local file, or can you pass a socket? Who knows! It's really easy to have a short, simple spec when it's full of ambiguity and people haven't had 26 years to beat it into a definitive, unambiguous state. Anyway, I digress.

Now do you get why the "X sux" stuff from Wayland fanboys is annoying?

Yes, but it's more annoying when it comes from the Wayland author FUDmonsters who understand X11 and yet still make silly claims about it. For example, from the link above, Packard claims:

X was created before there was MIME or Unicode, so there are many pages expended in the X specifications to do things that are more easily handled with MIME types and UTF-8 these days. For cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop, Wayland uses MIME-labeled UTF-8 encoded objects.

Well, that sounds all like OMG X sucks we need MIME and UTF-8. Well the thing is, in order to list types from a copy/paste transfer, applications exchange a string (i.e. atom) with the type name(s) available. And guess what? Almost everything these days except for plain text is exchanged using MIME types. If the MIME-type specifies UTF-8, then the data will be in UTF-8 format. So basically, X names types with a string, just like MIME, and MIME works *perfectly* without modifying or respecifying anything.

You can verify this easily: download and install a copy/paste debugger/sniffer and look at the list of types available that programs offer.

The ICCCM also specifies a few (non-MIME) types that you might like to support, such as TEXT, which maps perfectly on to text/plain and is all of 1/2 a line to implement (if(typeAtom == TEXT || typeAtom == textPlainAtom)...). And X11 sends arbitrary data (including NULs) because it represents data as data+length not a string, so you can exchange anything, such as UTF8.

Anyway, KP implies that that doesn't work with X11 copy and paste, whereas in truth it works perfectly and without any faff or hacking.

Wayland is designed to be something different to X with different goals.

Not so much. It's designed to replace X wholesale. It does windowing, compositing, input, copy/paste/DnD, and a bit opf inter client communication.

Those of us that "want to run software from 1996" are made fun of in Wayland presentations,

Yeah us with our legacy programs. From stroustrup:

"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

Meanwhile, I shall keep using legacy programs productively. XTerm works amazingly well, still. gvim works great---though I find I sometimes have to compile it with GTK disabled and with XAW (seriously WTF??) support because GTK can't seem to get its shit in order with fonts and everytime ubuntu updates itself/reboots, the font size changes. Xfig is old but works really well within its domain for producing simple, effective figures.

etc etc blah blah.

I also use some more modern programs too. And they all w

Re:I hate FPs like this.

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

Re:Wayland is nothing until

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Has it got network transparency?

[thegarbz]

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 GTK2

[Blaskowicz]

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.

Fuck remote display

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Re:Has it got network transparency?

[thegarbz]

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.