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Wayland Isn't Ready For the Fedora 24 Desktop (phoronix.com)

Posted by timothy on from the anticipation-is-killing-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes: There was much hope that Fedora 24 would be the first major Linux distribution using Wayland by default in place of an X.Org Server, that didn't pan out with Fedora 24 Workstation developers deciding not to use Wayland by default but it will remain a log-in time option. Fedora Wayland has made a lot of progress but functionality like on-screen keyboard, accessibility, remote displays, USB display hot-plugging, and other functionality is incomplete for the Fedora 24 timeline. At least there are many other Fedora 24 features that made it for this next release due out in June. Wayland will turn eight years old this year.

64 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm by koan · · Score: 1

    Yes indeed

    --
    "If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
  2. ob by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    // Lame joke about Hurd & DNF goes here

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:ob by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I sometimes rally race. Nothing fancy, just an amateur, and my car (Saab 900S Turbo) has a blown engine - so, definitely nothing fancy. Anyhow, DNF means "Did Not Finish" to me.

      I'm thinking with Hurd as the topic, DNF just might be applicable on a number of levels.*

      (*) Sorry RMS, but it's true. Please don't appear in the middle of the night with a Samurai sword and kill me while I sleep.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  3. Also missing... by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...network transparency, which is only available in the form of proof-of-concept unofficial patches, which themselves introduce substantial security holes.

    For Fedora, which underpins RHEL and other Enterprisey OSes, that's a major absence, even if Wayland's own developers don't consider it important.

    I really hope Wayland's developers stop treating it as a minority application unworthy of serious consideration (even though it's supposedly on their long term roadmap) and actively start work on it. They have a proof of concept. They have X to show them how security can work in practice. It's time the work was done.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    1. Re:Also missing... by kthreadd · · Score: 1, Informative

      Nothing stops you from running an X server on top of Wayland. That's what the Mac people are doing with XQuartz, they don't run X for their local apps but nothing stops them from running remote X apps. Sure GNU/Linux users should be able to do the same under Wayland.

    2. Re:Also missing... by NotInHere · · Score: 2

      which themselves introduce substantial security holes.

      Xorg is a single huge security hole, one that had to run as root until recently.

      Wayland is a step in the right direction. Perhaps in 20 years its successor will emerge and that one is perfect.

    3. Re:Also missing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yes, without network transparency, a Linux GUI is quite useless to me with my many Linux machines.

    4. Re:Also missing... by Crispy+Critters · · Score: 1

      And if X on Wayland works as well as XQuartz, it is just barely better than useless. When I run remote programs on XQuartz, it crashes a lot. Some programs can't reasonably be used at all, because XQuartz crashes so often (accidently hitting the mouse scroll wheel while in emacs seems to cause a crash every time). Real X on Linux has always worked beautifully in comparison. If X on Wayland is only as good as XQuartz, it is worth having in an emergency but no good for daily work. YMMV.

    5. Re:Also missing... by Crispy+Critters · · Score: 1

      In fairness, on the Fedora page of pending tasks to compete, remote display is listed first. I think we can assume this indicates that the importance of the issue is recognized.

    6. Re:Also missing... by Uecker · · Score: 1

      But where to the remote X app come from? They are UNIX/Linux apps which onlz exist because X is the universal display protocol. X essentially unifies the ecosystem of all UNIX-like operating systems and those apps also work on Mac OS X and Windows. This is extremely nice, but in the new Wayland word-order, this ecosystem will slowly fall apart... Breaking backwards compatibility for the display protocol is really stupid IMHO.

    7. Re:Also missing... by dbIII · · Score: 1

      They use that one to mock the people who ask for it.
      See also mocking shaped windows and the Enlightenment window manager, despite the Enlightenment project helping them out a great deal.

      Under all the hype and venom it's a framebuffer with the work of other projects such as gtk, enlightenment etc on top, a worthwhile project for some purposes going back to a more simple approach than X , but the hype and venom is really working against them.

    8. Re:Also missing... by Burz · · Score: 1

      Xorg network transparency is overrated. They never absorbed the advances made by the NX project, for one, meaning that X requires a LAN or similar very low latency connection to work well. The other problem is that transparency has been set in stone for a very long time, and competitors (WindowsNT and OS X specifically) leapfrogged X's net features by a mile in the early 2000s. That's why window-sharing and conferencing apps are plentiful on those platforms but very scarce on Linux -- actually, there is NO good screen-conferencing app for X, as X tends to rely on VNC for multiply-shared windows and VNC is stuck inefficiently tossing around bitmap deltas.

      I also came to this thread to say that fedora sucks, and anything GUI and desktop-related that's driven by Red Hat server priests is bound to fail. The FOSS community needs to stop looking to Red Hat for desktop features. Their people drive a lot of Gnome development, and they even managed to make the KDE4 suckage look decent in comparison. Their people and mentality are also a big reason why Google had to /fight/ with kernel devs to get necessary features for Android added to the kernel.

  4. Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Did you miss Perl 6 hitting 1.0 last year?

    I've used Wayland on Fedora on my laptop. Is it perfect? No, but absolutely usable. That's a big upgrade from just a year ago.

  5. Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora by Cassini2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Replacing X is a big project. Sometimes it takes a while to generate something good.

    I'm not sure anyone has a good model for handling rewrites of massive projects. The experiences of KDE 4.0 and Gnome 3.0 come to mind. Eventually, they were better, but it takes some time with a massive upgrade like that.

    The other issue is that User's often have a very good idea of what they don't like. However, bulimic criticism does not help to refine a software product. It just splits the ecosystem. Ultimately the user's need to use their computer, and the new software just isn't ready. So the developer's and user's go in different directions.

    Closed source isn't the solution either: with Windows 8, Microsoft split it's ecosystem. Windows 10 hasn't fixed the split (yet).

  6. Alternate title by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 1

    "The Fedora 24 Desktop Isn't Ready For Wayland"

    --
    My first program:

    Hell Segmentation fault

  7. Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by jopet · · Score: 2, Informative

    What I love about X is the flexibility one gets, which is unparalleled by any other system: I can easily start a window of an application running on another host on my machine, works fine if I am logged into that other machine using ssh. I can tunnel a whole session through sse usinv VNC and use the remote desktop directly on my local one. It supports mutliple monitors spanning one desktop or several desktop on several monitors.
    Does Wayland support these things too?

    1. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Does Wayland support these things too?

      Not yet, although various people have demonstrated proofs of concept. Since Wayland doesn't actually work reliably or properly yet, that is not a major issue. "Nobody" (probably one or two distributions will go bugshit, but not RHEL, and if you run Fedora then you chose to be an Alpha tester and you get what you signed up for) is going to be forced to switch to it for quite some time after it's made generally available by distributions.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by Kjella · · Score: 3, Interesting

      From what I've understood, VNC yes since it's essentially diff'd screen dumps with "damage areas" that are redrawn. In fact there's been some attempts at making a RDP-style remote capability that is slightly smarter because it knows the composition but not the contents of the window, like if you move a window the protocol knows it can just move rather than resend the contents. What you won't get is native X acceleration, meaning you can't actually send draw commands. Think like HTML, draw this box here with that text in this color.

      That is also why Wayland at least in the reference implementation doesn't have server side decorations, it doesn't want to understand fonts, antialiasing, buttons, animation, themes and all that. It is only a pixel-pusher, it composites images other software has made. By itself it won't draw a window border, a minimize/maximize/close button, nothing. It made the project much easier without dependency on any graphics toolkit, but I think it might have been a mistake to present it like this is the norm and clients should/might have to write their own decorations.

      I don't think applications should be forced to write their own decorations, it should be the norm that they can request decorations from the window system and that they'll take what they can get. The reference implementation should have been a wayland plug-in and might have been state of the art of the 1980s, a few fixed bitmaps and just "we expect actual environments like KDE, Gnome, even XFCE to come up with something more advanced this is basically a minimal placeholder". If you want to draw your own decorations that's something else.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by ssam · · Score: 1

      X forwarding still just works if you are running wayland locally. behind the scenes its using xwayland, but from the user point of view nothing has changed. I am sure there will be a more waylandy solution before the tool kits drop their X support (which probably wont happen for decades).

    4. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I've been a pretty avid fan and user of VNC, in one form or another, for a very long time. Is there any reason for me to care about this? Almost nothing I try wants to forward the GUI over SSH anyhow. What benefit does Wayland, eventually, offer? Is there any compelling reason to change?

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    5. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by complete+loony · · Score: 1

      X (the protocol) isn't really going away. You can run a cut down X server that does all of the decorations and so forth, then draws the window via Wayland. It isn't perfect, it may not appear exactly the same as it used to. In this way X joins VNC & RDP as client applications that can draw windows or desktops on a Wayland compositor.

      --
      09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
    6. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by dbIII · · Score: 2

      The theory is that it's going to be faster than X.
      Since the video drivers are mostly cut and pasted from X and there isn't much slowing down in the bits they have left out that has not happened yet.

      One of the biggest stumbling blocks they have is that they slow applications they want to display quickly are slow in portions that have nothing to do with displaying to the screen. Saving a few milliseconds in the new gedit starting up (Daniel Stone's strawman to show X is slow) is hard to notice when it still takes seconds to start. If they included their own high speed toolkit instead of letting things use the new slooooow gtk they could target where the bottleneck is, but that gets away from the idea of having a very simple thing instead of just their own X.

    7. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Much thanks! I knew someone would chime in. Well, I hoped they would. I'm probably going to end up just doing what I have been doing. I'm not really seeing any compelling reason to change my behavior. So long as it doesn't break anything then I probably won't even care if the distros start using it by default.

      An example is that, right now, I've been on the road since September of 2015. Well, not on the road so much but no longer home. I left on wanderlust and have managed to acquire a girlfriend, quite by accident, so I'm not actually wandering so much as existing in Florida until we go back home to Maine in the spring. As an aside, it should be interesting because she's only seen pictures and a live video feed. She's never been to my home but she's been to my house down here in Florida.

      While I've been on the road, much of my connection (like right this minute) is via VNC. I'm using VNC to connect to a system at home and I'm using the network from there. I don't get any lag or anything, it's not even a fast connection. It has held up just fine - better than expected. I've not had any major issues with connectivity or lag - and that includes much of a Maine winter, though the winter has been mild.

      I think this is the longest that I've made use of it, or at least the most that I've made use of it in one trip. I had multiple fail-overs provisioned, a variety of VMs all ready to spin up, and things like that. I didn't even have time to give it nearly as much testing as I'd like. I have it configured to only allow access in with some very specific settings - namely, this one is locked to an IP address that is a VPN address and doesn't change. It can connect with a couple of other methods but I've not had to use them - just to test them once in a while and make sure they're still running.

      I can even daisy-chain them together. I've got full access to my home network. I can access my video feed because that's locked down - it only allows connections from within the LAN. Things are all hard-set IP addresses instead of relying on DHCP. Yes, I'm a slacker and haven't bothered with IPv6 at home. But, best of all, it's working.

      I'm actually surprised that it has worked this well. It probably helps that I've been using VNC for years - I even use it when I'm home. There's a VNC viewer for most any OS out there and servers for more things than I can shake a stick at. I'm pretty fond of it. I was expecting a bit more trouble but it has been rock solid. I've even managed to remotely upgrade (not update - upgrade) the OSes at home via connecting with VNC. I did the 15.04 to 15.10 and, if I'm still here, I'll go to 16.04 next. (Everything is on Ubuntu at home except for one that's running CentOS and is sitting idle as a backup.)

      So, I guess? I'm still not seeing where this will make my life any different. Err... It's not going to mess with my TTY or anything? I hope not. I've gotten kind of fond of that over the years but I've not really paid enough attention to what Wayland is going to mess with. I've been taking a wait and see approach. So, yeah, I'm not going to worry about it and I'll hope that it doesn't break anything. I'm pretty easy to get along with. Thanks again and if anyone else thinks of anything to add, feel free.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    8. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Some good points there.
      For me however I use X to put output from a couple of dozen different machines on my screen and to display that needs more resources than you can get in a desktop box. VNC doesn't do the first without being very clunky (full desktops instead of just applications) and while it works with the latter a desktop on a desktop seems to annoy and confuse people a lot more than X. Wayland with or without vnc has a long way to go with the latter and they just laugh at people who want the former - so not for me just yet.
      I've got a few people on X11vnc so they can use their *nix machines from home and that as well as turbovnc (shares some code for compression etc) work very well as far as exporting whole desktops goes.


      Isn't it funny how the "cutting edge" is still something from 1999?

    9. Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc? by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I like the TurboVNC viewer. I just keep it as a full-screen and key-combo out of it. It works well BUT (and that's a big but) I'm acclimated to it and *very* familiar with it. I like it because I can use a slower machine and just pipe things like compiling off to something else. I like it because I can split resources up. I can absolutely understand* that not many will be able to "work" like I do. I just drop it to the task-bar while not in use, I might even throw them up on separate virtual desktops, I might even toss them up on multiple monitors but (strangely) I'm not too keen on multiple monitor** setups.

      It helps that I've ample resources to host all sorts of viewer clients. I really, really like that. I would like to learn more and do more with the X window forwarding. I can see some ways that that would be really beneficial - maybe I'll learn more about it when Wayland is pushed out on me. I suspect, strongly, that I won't be one of the people who is irate by it being pushed on me. If I want, I can spin up my own damned distro. I can even turn it into a Live USB distro AND throw in persistent data and take it with me and call it KGIIIOS. I don't even get mad about systemd. It doesn't interfere with anything that I do. I do wish there were options for those who do not prefer it - and by options, I mean well supported options with a decent community.***

      *: I've never really been one of those people. "It doesn't work for me. I don't see a use for it. I don't need it." Therefore, nobody wants it, needs it, or can use it.
      **: I've done some *nice* multiple monitor configurations since I retired. I confess to having a nice bezel-free configuration. I do not work at that. I don't like more than 3 and I'm fine with just one. I actually prefer a single monitor but I did recently propose a different "monitor" that I'd jump on. (Will explain if requested.)
      ***: Which makes me wonder why, if there are so many of them and they're as talented as they claim****, why they don't just make a distro?
      ****: Not really a slight, they're the ones who made the claim about being experts. I, a non-expert, could make a distro without systemd. I couldn't maintain it but it'd work. I could maintain it but not for anything meaningful - it would seriously lag behind on security fixes unless i somehow managed to tie in with something like the Ubuntu ecosystem.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  8. How have Windows and OS X been better? by jopet · · Score: 1

    For example, how do you use remote windows or something like VNC on either of those right out of the box?

    1. Re:How have Windows and OS X been better? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Informative

      For example, how do you use remote windows or something like VNC on either of those right out of the box?

      I can't speak to the Mac, because I choose not to waste money, but on Windows it couldn't be much easier. You can send remote assistance requests, or you can open up direct access for RDC. Either way, RDC uses RDP, which is a pretty damned good protocol by most accounts, and which is extremely tolerant of low-bandwidth connections.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      OS X comes with VNC. You configure it via the system settings. Windows comes with RDP. You configure it via the system settings.

    3. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by jones_supa · · Score: 2

      Except that building a Hackintosh is like building a house of cards. You have to make all choices perfectly and find the right combination of things (hardware choices, software modules and other tweaks) so that it works properly and does not crash.

    4. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by darthsilun · · Score: 2

      Building a Hackintosh? Why? Every time I price out a Dell, Lenovo, or HP laptop with equivalent features to my Macbook Pro it comes out the same or higher than the Mac.

      No, don't tell me about some $400 POS loss leader that you think is somehow equivalent to any Mac in terms of build quality.

      Argue with that if you want, that's been my experience.

    5. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Say that to the AC, not me. I did not comment about build quality but software unstability.

    6. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by Raenex · · Score: 1

      No, don't tell me about some $400 POS loss leader that you think is somehow equivalent to any Mac in terms of build quality.

      But that's the entire point. If you want a run-of-the-mill, commodity PC, and that's all you need, you don't get a Mac, as they only sell high-end. I've been getting by just fine for decades with cheap PCs.

    7. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by Raenex · · Score: 1

      True enough, they also sell an overpriced entry model. But I'm sure it's "build quality" makes it worth twice the price of something comparable.

    8. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by darthsilun · · Score: 1

      A $499 Mac Mini is not what I'd call "high end."

      I couldn't have said it any better.

    9. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by darthsilun · · Score: 1

      Software instability? On some dodgy hackintosh? Srsly? I dunno, OS X is pretty damn solid for me – on my Macs anyway.

    10. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by Raenex · · Score: 1

      What's funny is that you think this helps your argument, when earlier you were ragging on "$400 POS loss leader". For $400 you can get a much better PC than the POS Mac Mini, minus the ephemeral Apple "build quality" (also known as the Reality Distortion Field).

    11. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by webnut77 · · Score: 2

      And VNC is shit...it would be much nicer if they implemented RDP or some sort of analog for Quartz. I imagine you could compost Quartz images over RDP or even have WindowServer carry the information over a SSH channel to a local rendering client but we will never see that happen because it is closed source.

      $ dnf search rdp
      xrdp.x86_64 : Open source remote desktop protocol (RDP) server

      $ netstat -anp | grep :3389
      tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:3389 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 15287/xrdp

      I haven't used it much but it works.

    12. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Would you be able to do the Hackintosh install of OS X on the Dell or Lenovo or HP? Even if the features are equivalent, any of these could use hardware that's not used on any Mac and might therefore be untested by Apple. In other words, you'd be on your own

    13. Re:How have Windows and OS X been better? by Burz · · Score: 2

      X has 'NX' as a low-bandwidth add on that competes well with RDP. But its clunky to install and administer, and the main X projects ignored it because the original 1980s X network transparency is just so utterly perfect (chatty, high-bandwidth, no ability to broadcast or share windows).

    14. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by Burz · · Score: 2

      This did happen. It was called NX, made X really fly over Internet connections and added features like window-sharing.

      The main X projects (Xfree86 and Xorg) turned their noses up at it.

      It was excellent and good enough for me to use it for years. But eventually the writing was on the wall.... If NX features (and the use cases that gave rise to them) were not mainstreamed into X and *nix development, the conferencing apps would not appear. So Windows and OS X with their circa-2000s version of network transparency -- instead of the naive 1980s version X uses -- rule the roost.

      Oh and... fuck VNC!!!

    15. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by Burz · · Score: 2

      A "much better PC" that comes with malware out of the box and slows down after a year of use, and can't even play a DVD without an add-on that usually has some hideous marketing gimmick built in to bamboozle an over-50 user into opening their wallet.

      Haaaahahahaha!

    16. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Duh... Then you lose the price advantage, which was the original point...

    17. Re: How have Windows and OS X been better? by Raenex · · Score: 1

      I haven't had a need to play a DVD on my PC in years, but if I did I'd install VLC (but actually I wouldn't even bother with a DVD player on a new PC purchase). You can uninstall crapware or install Linux. Or you can just buy a cheap Chromebook or Chromebox if all you want is a computer for old people with no technical skills.

      Oh, and if you want to do PC gaming... I can toss in a $50, "outdated" graphics card and play most games at decent settings. Do that with your Mac Mini POS.

      Can't give you the smug Mac user feeling though.

  9. Re:Problems? X over ssh is sloooow, insecure by armanox · · Score: 1

    Because X11 wasn't just a random name - there were previous versions of the X Windows System.

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  10. Re:so DELAY the churn through versions! by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

    Hello. Running Fedora 22 on my development machine here. I didn't realize I had been forced to upgrade! :-)

    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  11. hmm by matushorvath · · Score: 1, Funny

    Ah, Wayland. The Hurd of windowing systems. I'm sure it will be amazing once finished.

  12. Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is a core feature of X11, but it hasn't worked since X11R5

    WTF is this shit? This FUD has been cropping up on every wayland thread recently. It is outright wronf. Remote windowing still works just fine. It did not stop working in X11R5. This is easily verified.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  13. Re:so DELAY the churn through versions! by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

    The problem is the lack of upgrades when a release gets too old. Especially for stuff similar to the glibc problem.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  14. Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora by markdavis · · Score: 4, Informative

    +1

    We run over 150 [Linux based] thin clients using X11R7, and before than, on X11R6. And being thin, that means remoting the ENTIRE DESKTOP SESSION- window manager, clients, everything. And those client apps come from various places on various servers, sometimes even the local machine.

    Now, this is a *BUSINESS* environment.... we are not trying to push video games, music, or movies through X11. That won't work well. But Firefox, LibreOffice, Clawsmail, GIMP, Pluma, Inkscape, Pidgin, PDF viewers/writers, etc, and all our AP/GL/AR/Payroll/etc work just dandy.

  15. Ran Wayland on F23 for ten weeks by djl4570 · · Score: 1

    I ran Wayland during F23 Beta and on F23 for about ten weeks. It worked a lot better than in F22 but still has some usability issues. A couple of examples: In gedit the user should be able to drag a tab to a new window. In Wayland this causes gedit to crash. In XWayland apps such as Firefox or LibreOffice, the cursor will randomly disappear. Once that happens you have to restart Gnome. I am a bit frustrated with the lack of Wayland fixes in F23 promised here https://fedoramagazine.org/hel... That being said I encourage anyone running F23 to try Wayland. Most of the time you won't notice a difference. I'll run it on a spare system when F24 beta lands.

    1. Re:Ran Wayland on F23 for ten weeks by dbIII · · Score: 1

      What happens is you run the Enlightenment environment under Wayland instead of Gnome? There has been a lot more work put in over more time so it's probably more stable.

    2. Re:Ran Wayland on F23 for ten weeks by djl4570 · · Score: 1

      Is this version 0.20.3 what you're talking about? I'll give it a shot when I have some time. [djl@Tesseract ~]$ dnf list enlightenment*
      Last metadata expiration check performed 13:01:57 ago on Sat Mar 5 09:55:42 2016.
      Available Packages {snipped for brevity}
      enlightenment.x86_64 0.20.3-1.fc23 updates
      enlightenment-data.noarch 0.20.3-1.fc23 updates
      Will it do anything rude like load a screen locker that runs even when Gnome is started. xfce did this to me and the UI was so primitive I thought it was malware trolling for my password.

    3. Re:Ran Wayland on F23 for ten weeks by dbIII · · Score: 1

      The UI is so far from primitive that a Wayland developer mocked it for having far too many features :(

  16. Re:Problems? X over ssh is sloooow, insecure by daffmeister · · Score: 1

    Which was a successor to the W windowing system.

  17. Re:Solution in search of a problem by dbIII · · Score: 2

    What unsolved problem does Wayland address?

    No one has any difficulty securely running GUIs across networks.

    Give them a chance to get it working on the desktop first :)

  18. Re:Back to XFree86 by knorthern+knight · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > From the XFree86 web page:

    >> XFree86 Release 4.8.0 is out NOW

    >> 4.8.0 release was released on 15 December 2008. Our next full release will
    >> be 4.9.0, and is expected to be released in the summer/winter of 2009

    [...deletia...]

    > How's that working out for you?

    In case you missed it, there was an internal revolt inside the XFree86 group, and XFree86 code was forked as Xorg, which is the current implementation. The last person to leave the XFree86 project forgot to turn off the lights.

    XFree86 is passed on! This project is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, It's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PROJECT!!

    See the current Xorg location http://www.x.org/wiki/ It actually has stuff from late last month, rather than late last decade.

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
    I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
  19. Re:Problems? X over ssh is sloooow, insecure by unixisc · · Score: 1

    In which case, why shouldn't it be called 'Y'?

  20. Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora by Burz · · Score: 2

    People doing payroll on a LAN practically do not matter. People sharing windows in teleconferences outnumber them by several orders of magnitude, and people use Windows and Macs for that type of use case. You may not know that MS and Apple got into a brief escalation/competition around 2000 over desktop conferencing, and in the process leapfrogged X network transparency considerably.

    X cannot share a window with 10 or 20 people efficiently. Linux users reach for VNC for that use case, and it is an inefficient throwback... nothing more than a bitmap-tosser.

  21. Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora by markdavis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That is why we should have been putting effort into something 100% backwards compatible with X11... X12. All kinds of things COULD have been rolled in- compression, local cursor, broadcast, etc.

  22. Re:Back to XFree86 by Bengie · · Score: 1

    No wonder Wayland is taking so long. The core Wayland team shares a lot of the same people as the core Xorg team. You do realize that people who made Xorg are mostly the people making Wayland because Xorg is such crap from the multi-decades of backwards comparability and old architecture that is no longer reflective of modern systems. Bailing wire and duct tape.

  23. Re:Thanks, so much thanks by Bengie · · Score: 1

    Seem much easier to search for "pointer confinement" "pointer locking" to get hits on Wayland. Seems Wayland won't let you move the cuusor like X does, but it will, eventually, allow you to confine or lock it. Seems to be taking fooorrrreeeevvvveeeerrrrr.

    Good news "MARCH 4, 2016 ... pointer confinement have all landed this cycle"
    https://blogs.gnome.org/mclase...

  24. Re:Hasn't systemd Deprecated Wayland? by unixisc · · Score: 1

    What is there in Wayland that must have systemd, as opposed to SysVinit?

  25. Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora by lsatenstein · · Score: 1

    Replacing X is a big project. Sometimes it takes a while to generate something good.

    I'm not sure anyone has a good model for handling rewrites of massive projects. The experiences of KDE 4.0 and Gnome 3.0 come to mind. Eventually, they were better, but it takes some time with a massive upgrade like that.

    The other issue is that User's often have a very good idea of what they don't like. However, bulimic criticism does not help to refine a software product. It just splits the ecosystem. Ultimately the user's need to use their computer, and the new software just isn't ready. So the developer's and user's go in different directions.

    Closed source isn't the solution either: with Windows 8, Microsoft split it's ecosystem. Windows 10 hasn't fixed the split (yet).

    Perhaps we just defer Fedora24 for six months, and allow the F24 enhancements to be rolled into Fedora23. From a workspace user, there is little difference between F22 and F23. So, we could say, Fedora23 is a rolling release. And Fedora23 becomes Fedora23.1

    --
    Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
  26. X versus VNC etc by phorm · · Score: 1

    Seeing a lot of comparisons between X and other remote-access protocols such as VNC. From a personal use perspective I've found:

    One nice thing about X is that the active window is independent of a particular desktop, or parent etc. When I use VNC, one frustration is that everything is bound inside the parent window (which is generally also restricted to a particular monitor). Larger desktops tend to suck, performance-wise, as you end up with a lot of pricey redraws.

    One *nice* thing about VNC is that you can push stuff that's been accelerated on the remote GPU.

    There's also stuff like Citrix, which I've that in concept is nice enough to draw things as separate windows without an MDI-style parent or virtual desktop, but in practice weird crap starts happening as soon as I move said windows between monitors etc. One good way to mess with Citrix is to have the overall desktop size change (say by hotplugging a monitor). It's also sometimes ugly with overlapping windows etc.

    At the moment my current setup is a combination of a remote X window and VNC (X11VNC+tightvnc). I've been working on OpenGL-based applications, which won't render across machines with X, however the beefy hardware is not on my main box. To that end, I've got the remote machine running X11VNC (which is able to grab the framebuffer) and tightvnc locally for rendering. That at least gets me the hardware acceleration for rendering. In addition, running the actual code editor+compiler via X allows me to have all the dialogs, debuggers, etc on my local machine and move stufff between monitors with ease.

    I believe there are tricks to make this work all in X-land, e.g. with xvfb, but I haven't had much luck with that yet. What would be nice is to see those capabilities all pulled together in something like Wayland where the network stack, framebuffer, etc and all the userland stuff play nicely with each other out-of-the box with minimal hackery needed to get things to work.