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

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.

Comments

Also missing...

[squiggleslash]

...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.

Re:Also missing...

[NotInHere]

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.

Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora

[Cassini2]

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).

Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc?

[jopet]

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?

Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc?

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Does Wayland support remote windows, vnc etc?

[dbIII]

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.

Re:How have Windows and OS X been better?

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re: How have Windows and OS X been better?

[jones_supa]

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.

Re: How have Windows and OS X been better?

[darthsilun]

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.

Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora

[markdavis]

+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.

Re: How have Windows and OS X been better?

[webnut77]

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.

Re:Solution in search of a problem

[dbIII]

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 :)

Re:Back to XFree86

[knorthern knight]

> 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.

Re:How have Windows and OS X been better?

[Burz]

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).

Re: How have Windows and OS X been better?

[Burz]

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!!!

Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora

[Burz]

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.

Re: How have Windows and OS X been better?

[Burz]

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!

Re:Wayland, Rust, Servo, Perl 6, Diaspora

[markdavis]

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.