Wayland - Beyond X (The H) [LWN.net]

Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 15, 2012 0:56 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
In reply to: Wayland - Beyond X (The H) by Cyberax
Parent article: Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

> It has all kinds of arcane features (like an x86 real mode emulator for legacy BIOS drivers!!!).

Who cares? Any system that's capable of running Wayland (which requires Linux and KMS) doesn't use that part of X.Org anyway.

> QT, GTK and EFL already have alpha-quality implementations which covers the majority of currently used frameworks.

That's the problem, right there. We wouldn't be complaining if Wayland were just a piece of infrastructure for the X server to use — but if the toolkits are going to migrate to the native Wayland protocol, then we lose the ability to use all of our current remoting solutions (NX and xpra) other than VNC (or potentially some future slightly-improved variation of VNC, which still will have bad performance compared to things like RDP).

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Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 15, 2012 15:52 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite so. Awesome local performance is great -- I don't want to argue against it. But gaining awesome local performance (which, for most apps I use, is moving things from too-fast-to-see to too-fast-to-see) at the cost of *all* remote performance (moving things from slight-delay to oh-now-I-can't-do-my-work-at-all) is a very definite loss.

Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 16, 2012 10:42 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

> moving things from too-fast-to-see to too-fast-to-see

Well, not in my experience. I can sense a noticeable delay in most GUI applications. Click on a menu and it takes some time for the dropdown to appear. Click on a button and it takes noticeable time for the next window to pop up.

I'm consistently amazed when I see my coworkers using their well-maintained Windows XP machines. It's as if menus pop up before they're actually clicked. Simpler applications start up with no visible delay.

Maybe some of my problem is the fact that I use weak-ish graphics cards in a dual monitor configuration. Maybe it's suboptimal drivers. Maybe it's inefficient GUI toolkits. Maybe it's power management. But sure as hell, my X11 desktop has crappy interactivity.

Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Feb 16, 2012 23:13 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

Windows XP might feel more responsive because it doesn't use compositing, which can have a performance cost (especially on older GPUs). On my 4.5-years-old hardware, programs feel slightly more responsive when KWin's compositing is turned off than when it's on.

(And of course there's also the possibility that the slowness you're experiencing is the fault of the applications and/or the widget toolkits, rather than the underlying window system. For example, I've noticed that Qt4 seems a lot slower than Qt3 when running on older CPUs.)

Wayland - Beyond X (The H)

Posted Mar 1, 2012 14:01 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. I'm still using KDE3 (well, Trinity). Too-fast-to-see. I can't see what compositing brings to the table other than wobbly windows, which I really don't care about.