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Ubuntu Is Switching to Wayland (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the little-surprise dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ubuntu is to ship Wayland in place of X.Org Server by default. Mir, Canonical's home-spun alternative to Wayland, had been billed as the future of Ubuntu's convergence play. But both Unity 8 the convergence dream was recently put out to pasture, meaning this decision was widely expected. It's highly likely that the traditional X.Org Server will, as on Fedora, be included on the disc and accessible from whichever login screen Ubuntu devs opt to use in ubuntu 17.10 onwards. This session will be useful for users whose system experience issues running on Wayland, or who need features and driver support that is only present in the legacy X.Org server session.

8 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. But is Wayland better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As long as Linux can remember where I positioned my monitors after I put the laptop back into the docking station, and as long as I can wayland-over-ssh, and as long as there are performance gains, then I don't care.

    I'm sure this post will be littered with "I hate change" type posts where people lament the loss of X for no other reason than passion and nostalgia, and I'll have to dredge through loads of nonsense before someone actually puts together a point-form list of pros and cons comparing Wayland to X

    1. Re:But is Wayland better? by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Network transparency. X11 has it. Wayland doesn't. Wayland's devs tend to handwave the problem, either claiming it will somehow be implemented once they work on the other laundry list of things they want first, or claiming it's a niche requirement nobody wants or uses.

      On top of that they're doing the #1 thing you're not supposed to do in development: completely rewriting a working system.

      X11's main flaw is that it's supposed to be inefficient. It might be, but I've never noticed any significant difference between user interface performance on Ubuntu vs Windows or Mac. I think much of it is "This sub-nanosecond operation that is only called once or twice every frame takes THREE TIMES AS LONG under X11 as it should!" type purism.

      I'm not happy about this.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re:But is Wayland better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I am not managing a computer remotely, I am using a computer remotely. Yeah, I ssh in. Always start with command line work - just like I do with a local login.

      But then I need some word processing. So I start the word processor on the remote machine, and view the window locally. Common case, do it several times per week. No, I don't want to transfer the file here, run a word processor locally, and then transfer it back. That is hell, especially when there is a large set of dependant files. Figures and whatnot.

      Surely this sort of thing can be done with wayland too. Wayland renders to memory and then blits to some display. All we need is to transfer that memory - or at least the changed altered - over the network. Then render on the display at hand.

      It is a necessary function, but something that shouldn't be all that hard. I don't expect to run 3D games this way - but word processing used to be fine over an ADSL line to the office 6km away - surely wayland can be made to run over the fiber I have today.

    3. Re:But is Wayland better? by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree with this. The "x11 is bloated" nonsense came from a book in the 1980s when computers had 2 MB of RAM. Its a myth because its far more efficient than Windows 10. The 1980s era X11 myth is long outdated and has no relevance in modern context.

      What Wayland is supposed to do could have been done with X extension, mainly, what would be needed as far as I know is a way for X apps to be able to synchronize with the refresh rate of the display so it can draw a frame and have it ready for the next refresh, by being notified of a redraw deadline through an X extension for this purpose. Another thing is a buffer swapping feature that allows an application when it has finished drawing a frame allowing it to tell the window system the frame is ready. If it blew the refresh deadline, the window system will use the last complete frame from a previous refresh cycle and the new frame will be used for the next refresh. This prevents window tearing and so on that has been i suppose the big reason for Wayland. All we really needed was this refresh timing and deadline information to be made available to apps, the deadline is set some time before the actual screen refresh to give time for the compositor to combine the apps frames into a single screen frame, and a facility for apps to use a new pixmap into the refresh buffer. You also need an extension for the compositor process for it to get the frames from all the apps so it can composite them all together into a single frame for for the video cards output.

      It should be noted as far as I am aware what Wayland does regarding direct rendering can already happen with DRI on the X server, your application has the video driver built into it and basically sends drawing commands directly to the GPU. This already happens with DRI on X. Yes, it can be dangerous, which is why there should be an easily accessible option to turn it off and send your openGL commands via GLX over X protocol to the X server which can then send them on to the GPU.

    4. Re:But is Wayland better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      For the millionth time, no X11 applications use X11 drawing primitives, and schlepping bitmaps will work just as well under Wayland as X11.

      You can fucking start Weston as a headless RDP server you fucking moron RIGHT (fucking) NOW. (Fuck!)

    5. Re:But is Wayland better? by thegarbz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Common case, do it several times per week

      What is common for one person is not common across the user base. There are cases where people will need X11 forwarding. The easy answer is: Don't use Wayland.

      However don't expect the rest of the world to sit by and support your edge case.

  2. Well by JWW · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ubuntu ditched the bad idea that was Unity. Time to ditch the bad idea that is systemd....

  3. Re:Remote display? by SumDog · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They say it's not the job of Wayland; that you can run X11 on top of Wayland to get X11-ssh forwarding or someone at sometime down the line will magically invent their own rendered (maybe RDP based, maybe something else).

    I can't really take this project seriously until they address this pretty critical issue. I don't have any issues with X myself. I use i3 and xrander and everything pretty much works the way I want it to. I don't play games in Linux; I have a windows laptop for that (Steam for Linux still kinda blows). Would nicer multi-monitor support for laptops be good? Absolutely! But with the track record of systemd taking over with no alternatives (I still run Gentoo/systemv and Void Linux/runit .. runit is awesome and amazingly simple btw) I'm going to hold off as long as I can.

    I don't hate new things either. Lately I've been trying out Vivaldi over Firefox. I'll try new things, but I hate seeing all this half-assed garbage just breaking the Linux desktop.