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Wayland Ported To DragonFlyBSD (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Wayland 1.9 and the reference Weston compositor have been ported to DragonFlyBSD. Significant changes were made to get Wayland/Weston running, and you must either already be running an X.Org Server or be using the Linux-ported Radeon and Intel kernel mode-setting drivers, plus jump through a few setup steps.
Because Wayland is being written with a clean, modular design that doesn't attempt to tightly couple a bunch of unrelated nonsense into it to create a complicated mess. Because Wayland is being written primarily by former X developers who have pushed X to its limits but have no choice but to start from the ground up to get modern features such as tear-free drawing. Because Wayland is capable of running X applications thanks to a compatibility layer. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons that escape me, but these are just a few off of the top of my head.
The trouble with Wayland, or rather why I'm deeply suspicious of it is that some of the claims from the devs about wayland and X11---and bear in mind they're X11 devs too---are flat out wrong at best and deeply deveptive at worst. Why the need for a FUD attack? If Wayland is better it ought to win on merit, not FUD.
Tahe for example this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]
Going through one at a time.
1. Extensions are what X11 calls API updates. Wayland will get API updates too, so this is not an advantage of wayland beyond version 1.0.
1. A, B, C: Almost all extension version updates add new API calls and keep the old ones. Sending Foo 2.0 calls to Foo 2.2 works just fine. Not to say that versioning isn't a problem, but then fixing the API is apparently bad for X but nothing else.
2. Well core X11 is super simple and a tiny setup of Xinput 2. This leaves essentially 2 input systems left of any complexity, 2.2 and 2.0, and as far as I can tell 2.0 isn't actually separate from 2.2. So, basically X has one major input system which actually looks kinda similar to the Wayland one.
3. That's a misunderstanding of "mechanism not policy"
4. So Xorg and Xfree86 got a bit crazy and then got refactored. Apparently historical cleanups are a bad thing? This happens in any project of any age.
5. Apparently it's impossible to add a new API call for synchronisation because from (1) that X11 isn't allowed api updates unlike every other system.
6. Yeah OK, fonts are not great.
7A A badly designed chunk of Xorg is apparently a problem with X11 now. Oh and it's been fixed so it's not a problem at all. But apparently every misstep in one implementation of an X server fixed 5 years ago is a reson it's bad now.
7B That was pure fud in 2013 when it was written. Xrandr and monitor hotplugging has worked flawlessly for years.
7C Huh? There's been xrandr front ends for years which remember certain layouts. Hell, Arandr, the nice GUI point and click one in all the repos remembers layouts just fine.
7D That smells like bullshit to me. Unless the second monitor is a separate screen (X11 term for something little used now) they it'd be impossible for one to have compositing and one not. I've not heard of anyone using screens in years.
8 Yeah and real toolkits are poorer for it. The window tree is a really nice thing when you have latency. Because with tree'd systems the server remembers which sub-sub-sub window a mouse click went to, and you could ignore the absolute position. With a treeless system all you have to go on is the position.
With latency, if you click, then the display updates then it processes the click, your click goes not where you want, but where the GUI is now. This I find happens more often than I'd like in web "apps". With tree based systems, sure the widget moved, but the assignment of the click to the window was latency free, so your click ends up correctly on the now-moved widged.
IOW tree based systems are superior. Many toolkits abandoned it for compatibility with non tree based systems. What we have now is actually fundementally worse in high latency environments.
9 Yes this is finally a genuine, no-nuance flaw.
10 C this is not correct if you have a compositing window manager, because it can do whatever it likes with the final display.
10 D their solution is to make the compositor do all this shit in Wayland. That could be done equally well in X. Sure, the current convention has a small flaw, but X11 now supports the Wayland way too.
10 E just use the features of the compositing window manager. It intercepts all key presses and windows anyway.
So without getting into the merits or demerits of Wayland, it's disappointing to see the devs engaging in a colossal FUDstorm.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I support Wayland, but RDP is not network transparency.
Not even close.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Slashdot comments have really gone downhill recently =P