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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.
... 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!
"Which is not really newsworthy."
Well it is actually. Various vested interests have been plying the X Windows is dead, Wayland is the way forward line for a few years now. For Ubuntu - a distro not exactly known for its conservatism and aversion to releasing bleeding edge sofware - to return to X as the default graphics system is a pretty obvious statement that Wayland is a long way from being ready for prime time.
Despite it's touted simplicity, Wayland lags behind X functionality in both network awareness and driver support, as well as still a slight lag in performance despite its purported closeness to the hardware compared to X. Am I misunderstanding something?
...we even have Wayland/Mir.
The X Server stack was fast enough back in the days of the FOUR-EIGHTY-SIX.
And almost all the implementations of the new system lack features that we already expect to work on x server without thinking about it.
This is the first time in a long while that a company steps back from what looked like suicidal commitment to a bad idea, and actually went back to what works.
I wish Lenovo did the same with the 7-row keyboardes on the ThinkPad. Also I wish Linux companies (except RedHat, of course) would ditch SystemD.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The shit is a total clusterfuck with Wayland. Something happens to gnome-shell--REBOOT. Some random gnome-shell plugin acts bad, no way to unload it--REBOOT. Mouse stops working--REBOOT. Come back from screen lock and clicks don't work--REBOOT.
All of this shit is possible to completely fix non-destructively when gnome-shell runs under X by Alt-F2 'r', or lacking input, Ctrl-Alt-F1 'killall -HUP gnome-shell'.
Now Alt-F2 'r' is disabled, and every other previously working solution causes EVERYTHING to be killed, because now gnome-shell is the parent of the entire session. The gnome-shell developers have basically said tough, this is intended operation, and you shouldn't need to restart the shell ever. Fuck them. I leave my workstation powered up for months on end, yet I have to restart gnome-shell it seems every week or two sometimes.
Well, it's a bit more than that. The statement has been in various circles 'wayland is good enough *today*, you don't need xorg anymore'
This is acceptance that people do have things they can't do in Wayland, and it needs to be opt-in rather than opt-opt to avoid bad user experience.
It's not 'wayland will *never* be better', but it is a statement that it has a ways to go, and some of the limitations are design choices that will require interesting conversations, particularly about security with regards to screen sharing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is called the Tyranny of the Default, and is a real thing.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
A vendor in it for money chooses to backtrack and default away from the new and shiny. I don't think that is about choice and a hell of a lot more about what they think of the current state of Wayland.
I think they should be congratulated on responding to user sentiment. I wish more companies would admit they acted prematurely and roll back changes that didn't work out. I can think of one or two very large Linux features that I could live without, but which are foisted on all of us.
At some point that 40 year old code based designed around a 386 when the software had to draw even the primitives just isn't going to cut it anymore.
You got the reality exactly backwards. A codebase designed around being efficient enough to run on a 386, and field-tested on every thing imaginable for 40 years.
Anything that today's wonder boys can generate, is destined to be a steaming pile in comparison - just because they never saw a reason to learn what efficiency or portability even is.
Barring a major miracle, X will stay with us for quite some time yet.
> that 40 year old code based designed around a 386
It's less than 30 years, and you can say exactly the same about Linux.
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