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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
There is already a reference RDP implementation in Weston. So to answer your question, it's happened already.
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?
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
SJW n. One who posts facts.