FOSDEM: The Wayland display server

Oh, a personal attack! How sweet.

> The whole point of general-purpose OS is to support bazillion applications.

I'm not denying that. But the point is that Wayland will in no way improve situation with inconsistent UIs. If anything, it will make it worse because of window decorations. In the whole “interface hall of shame”, window decorations are the only thing that are usually consistent on Linux.

> There are more Android applications then X11 Linux application - by far! And Android is few times younger then X11…

Android applications don't have such a consistent UI either.

> Which is true for MacOS and Windows, too. Somehow it does not change the fact they all use common code to draw windows decorations.

Agreed. But from the talk, my impression is that it's not what Wayland is about to do. My impression is that each toolkit will handle everything on their own and Wayland will merely paste bitmaps on the screen.

> Well, perhaps it's time to fix that problem instead? I'm not talking about killing high-level toolkits, but if we want to reach some kind of consistency then moving common functionality to common place makes sense.

Agreed. My point is that Wayland does not do that and does not fix any real problems.

At the same time, it takes away what some love about X -- network transparency (and before someone tells me that do transferring bitmaps is good enough, please try VNCing over an SSH tunnel and VPN going across Asia; my experience is that X forwarding works much better (even if not perfect)).

High level toolkits are fine, but in my view, a low level toolkit should be defined (think: rendering API) which those would use. If done properly, this low level toolkit could be defined in such a way that it would work perfectly over network but when run on the same host, would talk directly to graphics driver (or something).

After watching the talk, I had this strange impression that speaker started by saying how toolkits no longer use rendering API and this is the reason not to have rendering API. My take on this is that I may agree with the presumption but my conclusion is that the toolkits need to be changed.

> This is doubly true for the new functionality like the ability to draw windows decorations.

I don't really agree on this though. For me, clients should not care about what's around their windows -- its content that they should care about. It's a bit like windows not caring where they are placed on the screen. This gives consistency, an easy way to control window decorations as well as window decorations not hanging when application hangs.