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Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Will Default To The X.Org Stack, Not Wayland (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Five years after their original goal to ship Ubuntu with Wayland, Ubuntu 17.10 transitioned to using the Wayland display system by default as part of their transition to GNOME Shell as the default desktop. But with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release, Canonical has decided to transition back to the X.Org Server. Their reasoning for moving to an X.Org Server by default is better support for screen sharing, remote desktop, and better recovery from crashes. But for those interested the Wayland session will still be available as a log-in option.
Or like being incapable of running GUI apps as root - which breaks among others gparted, and won't ever be fixed for native Wayland apps, but you need to "think of the children" - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/sh...
... the Wayland devs kept telling us that no one cares about remoting with X which is why they hardly bothered to work on that side of it. Were they wrong?? Say it ain't so!
Not at all. Remote desktop was always important to a subset of users that were not at all targeted by Wayland. Those same users happen to also be the ones who would use LTS releases of Ubuntu.
If you read the original post they will use Wayland as defaults on all other releases and specifically rushed Wayland to 17.10 to gauge if it will be a default in 18.04LTS. But there are some features that need to be worked on before it will be suitable for LTS release.
But by all means smug on.
Most of the Wayland maintainers have also been working on X.org for a long time, and I trust the developers to know better than the users when a rewrite is due. From what I've read, in addition to the issue of maintainability, X.org is inherently insecure (any app is allowed to draw over / screencapture / keylog any other app), contains a lot of code that is never used anymore (e.g. the builtin font rendering and GUI toolkit in X), while modern developments such as DRI and compositing were bolted on as ugly extensions. So if the X.org maintainers say it's cleaner to rewrite it than to keep bolting on new features on top, then I believe them.
:).
If you're genuinely interested in why people are developing Wayland, I recommend looking at this talk
Because back in the days of the "FOUR-EIGHTY-SIX" your cpu was generally faster than your graphics card. Nowadays your graphics card is so much faster than your cpu the X stack leaves your graphics rendering waiting on the CPU.
No it isn't: X has supported hardware acceleration from the earliest days and continues to do so. See, for example GlamourGL, in which Xorg uses OpenGL shaders to do all the 2D drawing operations.
So Wayland is an attempt (successful or not is an entirely different discussion) to get the cpu out of the way for your graphics card to work more efficiently.
No, that's utter crap. Wayland doesn't do that AT ALL. Wayland is basically a system for sending bitmapts to a compositor and have the compositor send back input. Wayland provides very little else and certainly no rendering. Applications are expected to render to their own buffers using something like DRI, which is PRECISELY the same as they use under X11 too if running locally.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Right indeedio I will bite!
Forget the speed,
Yes indeed, forget that because there's no evidence X is slow. Sure it was slow on a Sun 3/60 and people were maybe right to whine then. It's been a very VERY long time since I've run a 20MHz desktop CPU.
the issues around hardware access
Which are?
the issues on on exclusive access that creates a huge security issue for lockscreens
Oh you mean the issue that doesn't happen at all if you use a compositor like 99% of modern desktops. Note: if the desktpos don't implement that, it's their fault not an inherent limitation in X.
the inability to use most of the buttons on a laptop while a locked session is in progress (but yes having to open up and login to a device just to hit the volume down key is totally what we expect from modern 2018 systems).
Ah yes, the thing that isn't an issue with a modern compositor architecture. Note: bugs in gnome aren't bugs in X11.
Look: the modern X architecture routes EVERYTHING through the compositor just like Wayland. So the security tradeoffs are identical. It's impossible for an actave grab to interpose.
If gnome have done a shit job of actually using the features that X has had for the last decade or more, blame gnome, not X.
I'm not going to repeat them all here (because who has the time), this horse has been beaten to death so often it is now a goo of red puree mushed into the carpets
No it hasn't. It's been beaten by ill-informed people repeating poorly understood talking points.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The code is actually not bad in my opinion and due to its age, a lot of problems have already been fixed a long time ago. Ilja von Sprundel (just featured in another story on slashdot) did some auditing a couple of years ago and fixed many bugs. He gave a talk about it on the CCC conference and he seemed actually quite fond of X from a security perspective (quotes: "the developer involved actually amazing" and about the core protocol "this code is actually pretty cool (from a security perspective) you can see where the code got patched over (e.g. integer overflow checks)") . In fact, he seriously complained about clients and in particular about Qt/KDE in this talk. This is a much newer code base...
I worked on X codebase and I know it's shit. It's a patched-over shit, but still. Integer overflows, memory corruption, it has everything.
But even setting this aside, X.org is insecure by design. Any application can just send any events to any other application, so there's no point in trying to make it secure. If you have access to an X connection then you already have full access to the user's data. For example, you simply can inject "ctrl-t" into the shell to launch a terminal and then inject any commands you want into it.
And about "todays wonder boys" - Wayland is designed and written mostly by the same developers who are working on X.org