LPC: Life after X

Posted Nov 8, 2010 10:01 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

People have been trying to replace X for decades but nothing's taken off yet.

Hmmm.... I believe X has probably 1% - 2% share in graphical desktops across all computers. Just because nothing's displaced it in the UNIX/Linux space doesn't mean it's a model of wild success writ large.

And that's more than adequate to explain the lack of attention X usability / compatibility / impedance matching gets from the Windows and Mac crowds. It's not surprising X clients don't interoperate well with the native environment in those worlds. Given then fact that Wayland's coming from within the 1% - 2% community gives me at least some hope that they actually understand how X gets used and how to make it work and work well.

As to the network transparency debate: There seems to be multiple levels here, and it all gets oversimplified when people fixate on the fact that local clients are the default focus of Wayland. There's the X way of doing things, which everyone is comfortable with inasmuch as they have programs that use it that they rely on and that they know work. At the far other end of the spectrum are windowing environments that offer no remote access model. These are an endangered species. And in between we have a number of different options, ranging from NX, which apparently keeps the drawing-primitive flavor of X with a lot of other improvements, to VNC/RDP, which move more in the bitmap-drawing direction.

Personally, I'm still not 100% sold on the network transparency at the graphic-primitive level. Nothing in Wayland seems to truly get in the way of network transparency, as long as you're comfortable with a rendered-bitmap level protocol between client and server, rather than a more highly structured graphic primitive protocol.

Posted Nov 8, 2010 10:42 UTC (Mon) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]