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linux.conf.au 2013 videos onlinelinux.conf.au 2013 videos onlinePosted Feb 7, 2013 5:12 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)Parent article: linux.conf.au 2013 videos online
Just wanted to mention that wayland and weston packages were added to the Fedora 18 updates repository recently. I didn't really find any instructions but looking at the contents of the various packages I noticed a weston-launch binary... so I switched to runlevel 3 and then ran weston-launch. That seemed to work. The was a panel at the top and on the left corner was a terminal icon and on he right corner was a clock. I opened up the terminal and it appears to (currently) be the only application to play with. Of course one can run command line tools inside of the terminal window but that was about it. I didn't see a way to exit but Alt+Control+Backspace did the trick of dumping back to the console. Looks interesting. I'm hoping Fedora will add additional packages to Fedora 18 over time and if not, hopefully more will be there for Fedora 19.
Regarding the Wayland video... he basically makes he same argument that the KDE folks did for blowing up KDE 3 and doing a completely new thing with KDE 4... that the Xorg codebase was designed way back when (starting in 1981?) and that although a lot of things have been bolted on in the last few years they are really hacks and the complexity of the X11 system can't be fixed without breaking a lot of things... and if you are considering breaking things... why not start over with a modern design built to get us into the 21st century?
Yeah, everything has to be ported to the new system but most of the major toolkits are supposedly in good shape so people should get started. He isn't just some yokel talking about it either... he and the main guy (I forgot his name) behind Wayland have been hacking on X11 stuff for ~5 years and they just got sick of banging their heads against the complexity wall. X11 does a large number of sit-and-spins that are incredibly hard to troubleshoot... and that to meet the challenging future something new was needed. He makes a compelling case... and claims that X11-based applications can run within the new system with a compatibility layer that will help during the transition.
I'm game. Give me some applications to try out.
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linux.conf.au 2013 videos online Posted Feb 13, 2013 18:43 UTC (Wed) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Basically, the guy who forked Xorg off from XFree (because he was the only guy really doing any development) is himself 100% behind Wayland.
And Wayland has been designed, aiui, so that you can either run X over wayland, OR wayland over X, whatever floats your boat. So that when X does sink (as seems inevitable) Wayland will be a seamless transition.
Yes there's a lot of things X can do that Wayland can't. But Wayland was designed to be able to replace X so if somebody wants to code that stuff, there's nothing seriously impeding them from doing so.
Cheers,
linux.conf.au 2013 videos online Posted Feb 20, 2013 23:49 UTC (Wed) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
Why not put the X protocol in Wayland itself ?
That way all controversy would disappear
As is, if i'm not wrong, it is a choise between Wayland apps or X apps. The idea of a server on top of another server, seems more clumsy and ugly hack than most things that can be said about xorg "codebase".
If it is a mass "transition", means the most severe fork of anytime, it will take A LOT of years to transition everything to Wayland...
And articles like "next year is the year of desktop Linux" will still keep floating every year never questioning the real why...
So liking or not, better or not, a "fork" to all the immense app base has been created... an "app developer" should target X and maintain what is familiar and most of "compatibility" to most of systems for a lot of years... or should he try Wayland ? ...
whatever it is, he would risk bugs and complains about speed and or jerkiness, never seen before, because of that server on top of server model...
Usually "start all over again" can improve things no doubt, Wayland can induce that no doubt... but there is a huge risk in that, besides screwing all development scheduling...
Comparing to now and concerning mass adoption... this can be the kind of "mistake" that can take a lot of years to recover... if ever... (THINK ABOUT IT).
< sometimes i think of what a friend of mine of Merrill Lynch said... "sometimes the best business of all is not be on any business at all"... wait & see... >
linux.conf.au 2013 videos online Posted Feb 21, 2013 0:05 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
> Why not put the X protocol in Wayland itself ?
Because a big part of the point of this is to get rid of the legacy cruft that is in the X11 protocol.
> As is, if i'm not wrong, it is a choise between Wayland apps or X apps.
You are wrong. You can have an X server which renders to Wayland.
> The idea of a server on top of another server, seems more clumsy and ugly hack than most things that can be said about xorg "codebase".
Allowing multiple processes to work in concert to provide some service is a fine and potentially elegant idea. An X11 server which works with the Wayland server is not importantly different from a window manager which works with the X11 server. In each case, different tasks are taken on by different processes.
Did you know that some apache web servers serve content that is stored in an NFS filesystem? This can be quite effective and again is not inherently different from an Xorg/Wayland combination.
Certainly there is a large risk in developing wayland if the goal is to replace X11 everywhere. However if the goal is to have fun, learn stuff, and create something that might be useful, then the risk isn't all that great.
linux.conf.au 2013 videos online Posted Feb 21, 2013 3:25 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
in addition to the other objections people will raise, having the X protocol in Wayland in addition to the Wayland protocol, this wouldn't eliminate the problem that many of us fear, which is GUI toolkit authors deciding to drop support for X and only support the Wayland protocol (with it's current lack of network transparency)
linux.conf.au 2013 videos online Posted Feb 21, 2013 4:15 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
Lack of network transparency in Wayland in roughly matched by the lack of network transparency in 'ls'. Yet I can run "ls" on my NFS filesystem without trouble.
If you want network transparency, you get to use two protocol converters. One that runs on the same machine as your applications, appears to be a Wayland server, and flings images over the network in some way. The other runs on the same machine as you display, acts as a Wayland client, and hands the images over to be displayed. Similarly input events are passed back.
I can easily imaging 'ssh' growing functionality to start these two protocol converters for you (if so configured) - just as it currently will transparently set up X forwarding over the secure connection, with X-authentication handling. Then you should "ssh myhost may-gui-app" and it would "just work" just like it does now.
So lack of network transparency in Wayland isn't a problem - it is an aspect of the well-structured design.
And fear that developers of some project might drop some functionality that you find valuable certainly has some validity (see also Gnome-3) but tying that fear to the functionality of some other project seem hard to support - peoples reasons for breaking things are usually quite different to the reasons that you expect.
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