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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.
GNUBSD now with more GNU!
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Yada yada, yoda yoda. Get this. There are some of us that spend their nights and weekends making free software. You don't have to use our software. Distributions don't have to package our software. But they do, and no matter how many swear words you know is not relevant. The distributions make their own decisions and if you don't like that then you can start your own distribution with just the software you want. End of discussion.
Old init ran init scripts. New init manages complex dependencies, makes sure the system state stays proper, journals failures, and generally does a lot of system component integration. People prefer cobbled together over complex architecture.
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because people could even install both X11 and wayland and run one or the other depending on what mood they're in. no lock-in to anything.
Plenty of people are asking why we want to fork lift X out for something completely different.
And how many of them are current X.org developers? Because most of the Wayland developers are long time X.org and previously FreeX86 developers.
Lots of people are arguing the handful of real and actual problems that do exist with X can by solved by adding (some of which has already happened) a few more extensions and that if you don't care about the old X protocol stuff well don't use its mostly harmless to you just sitting there.
Then those "lots of people" should put up or shut up. On the other hand, the people who actually have been trying to do that with X.org for nearly a decade say its horrendous and thus that's why they're working on Wayland.
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.
Simple, the Kernel does one thing, that being be a kernel. Same with X11, it is a display server. They both do the ONE thing that they were designed to do, and do it well.... in the case of X11 it is debatable, but you can usually get some form of display running even if it is horribly inefficient. The UNIX philosophy is looked at two ways:
1 - many smaller programs that can be combined to do a task.
OR
2 - do one thing and do it well.
SystemD, what started out as an init system + service manager ( see how it's doing more than one thing from the get-go? ), now does init + service manager + DHCP + NTP + login + its own fucked up form of journaling + who the fuck knows what else was thrown in recently.
Bit of a difference there, no? And it's not like you can easily ( as far as I know anyways* ) pick and choose what "modular" parts you use without recompiling the whole damn thing. That also means any vulnerability in say NTP would require a full on recompile of the whole source instead of the "modular" NTP portion only.
*If it's not true, I would appreciate getting pointed in the right direction to see where I may be wrong...
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
X was built with a client/server architecture paradigm.
So is Wayland.
These days, the X server doesn't do anything,
What about receive connections from remote x clients and put them on the display.
Linux/*NIX is used for more than gaming. Shocking, I know. But you'll get over it.
Have gnu, will travel.
install both X11 and wayland and run one or the other
And what happens when some major app switches to the Wayland libs, leaving X networking behind? Sure, there's an X compatibility layer. But given the attitude of Wayland supporters ("nobody networks clients anymore, so lets throw this stuff out") I don't anticipate support for that feature to be long lived.
There are too many people running around, both in the systemd and Wayland camps who think that, because they don't do something or understand it, it just doesn't need to be done. Why don't we all take up a collection to buy them GameBoys or XBoxes and keep them away from important systems stuff?
Have gnu, will travel.
The problem is that systemd's functionality spans way beyond an init system or even a daemon management system. Sooner or later, Linux apps are going to be built on top of systemd functionality. Therefore you will be stuck switching over to systemd if you want to use those apps or hope that someone maintains init compatibility within those apps. And then projects based off of that software will start to depend on the systemd functionality, creating multiple layers of mess.
It all boils down to the fact that you can't stop devs from using systemd features despite the fact that they're poorly designed and maintaining forks that are compatible with non-systemd init systems will only work for so long before the task is too overwhelming. That's why there was such a battle against it being adopted by distros but that battle has been lost and resistance is now futile.
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.
Strictly speaking that's not true, from the Wayland FAQ (emphasis mine):
Why not extend the X server?
Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option.
I guess the main reason Wayland doesn't take so much flak is that it's obvious the mission scope has vastly changed from the 1980s display server to the 2015 display server. And it's main deficiencies are most visible in the markets where it's barely present (desktop) or has been replaced wholesale (Android), while the init system seems like you're changing a winning team, honestly when was the last time init scripts was a deal breaker for anything? It has a much more "nice-to-have" feel to it or at least fixing corner cases most people never noticed.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Even if this weren't about "free software", the point still stands. Just because Random Tard #349834 dislike systemd that doesn't obligate any distro or individual developer to actually care. Nor does it obligate them to support this random tard's tantrum.
Actually it wasn't. They always said remote desktop was not within the protocol scope and entirely up to the client to support.
People said that won't work. They wrote a bit of test code that proves it did, and that's where it ended. RDP is not part of Wayland, but it is possible to implement with Wayland.
since the vast majority of Linux applications
UNIX applications in corporate environments. Linux being the desktop. At least Cygwin/X will still support TCP while you clowns gut Linux. The desktop was a neat dream while it lasted.
Have gnu, will travel.
RDP is simply not an adequate substitute for a network-transparent window system. Yes, it'll let you do some things badly, and other things mediocrely, but that's about it. And I haven't seen any evidence that the Wayland folks understood that early on, so I haven't kept up with Wayland when there's working X.Org.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have the X11 book on my shelf, and it's about 300 pages long. Most people don't understand it. Nonetheless, there are a lot of criticisms. Generally when someone re-writes a project from scratch, it deserves to be criticized. But X wasn't particularly great to begin with. There were a lot of criticism even when it was written, calling it bloated, etc. The "Unix Haters" handbook has a whole chapter on the topic. So if it gets replaced, meh........hopefully it's with something better (which doesn't seem to be the case but whatever).
Systemd on the other hand, replaces an init that was so simple everyone could understand. Furthermore, systemd only has ~300k lines of code, so it's not too hard to navigate and find dislikeable things, either. People have been reading through the code and finding things to dislike.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
WTF? United? No, son, no... The dream has never been about unity (unless you mean the silly Unity from Cannonical). The dream has been about the exact opposite of unity. It has been about freedom of choice. There's no unity in FOSS. There are groups of united people but no universal thing - not even EFF or The Linux Foundation is the final authority. In fact, you - the user, are the final authority.
I'm not sure why you'd have that notion. It's exactly not that. You can, and should, find what works for you and are encouraged to work off code that's already been started so that you need less effort to make something that suits your individual needs. If express individuality and an atmosphere of independence is unity then I'm not sure where I need to go to buy a new dictionary.
Now there are united groups but there's no whole - there's no universal - there's no sense of unity other than a sense of community and that only goes so far. in fact, I'm an aficionado and an oddball to some extent. I'm not an open source zealot (even though I use and prefer it) but one who suggests you use what you want to use and what works best for you. Hell, I flit between distros and even code bases with nary a thought. There's no unity - there's freedom of choice and an encouragement to make what you need.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Am I mistaken or are you suggesting a return to the dumb terminal?
Actually, with so much computing being done in "the cloud" it really has started to look like a return to those days. Hmm... That which is old is new again. I am not, honestly, sure what side I am on assuming that I own and control the remote resources as well as the 'terminal' that is attached to it. It does seem like we're sort of returning to those days just with more local resources to work with the remote data, load more content, and cycle it faster.
Curiouser and curiouser.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
So you are admitting your software is actually WORSE than proprietary, since users can actually vote with their wallets and affect the outcome of proprietary whereas with FOSS all they get is the classic "its free you can't complain" meme and the finger? Good to know, thx.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Slashdot comments have really gone downhill recently =P