Strong words

Posted May 25, 2012 17:16 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
In reply to: Strong words by renox
Parent article: Announcing printerd

Sorry, I didn't mean to upset anyone. But I tend to have more confidence in the answers of those who designed the architecture, went to some trouble to document it, who've rolled their sleeves up and are actually doing the work, than in people who make snide potshots from the sidelines.

We all wish that the Linux desktop experience was better today. But what are your technical objections to Wayland? You admit that the current state of X is non-optimal. Have you got some constructive suggestions to improve the situation?

"The one who says something cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

Strong words

Posted May 25, 2012 18:30 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the place that X is weakest is the place that Wayland is punting on. that's hardly the "don't interrupt the person doing it" situation.

Strong words

Posted May 25, 2012 18:56 UTC (Fri) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

> Have you got some constructive suggestions to improve the situation?

Not really: the reason why X is not in a good state is due to chronic lack of manpower ( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MT... )..

Wayland will "help" by doing less, OK, but let's not pretend that the existence of Wayland is a good thing..

But what's the better alternative to Wayland?

Posted May 25, 2012 22:25 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

> let's not pretend that the existence of Wayland is a good thing..

There seems to be some memo that I didn't get. _Why_ is the existence of Wayland a _bad_ thing? What else would be better? It is a long overdue refactoring of the display/rendering/windowing plumbing that is careful not to reinvent new wheels but replace old and wobbly ones. In the medium term it will allow X to drop a load of old cruft.

This will surely end up making the overstretched X maintainers' lives easier, and more fulfilling than bodging improvements that are better and more simply done elsewhere.

It seems to be well supported by Red Hat and hopefully Canonical will soon be getting actively involved too.

As for remote-X issues, I certainly don't disagree there's problems there.
Using Linux desktops over network X clients has been getting steadily worse over recent years, not because X is getting worse but because it is being asked to do more and more. GLib/cairo-based software expects textures and gradients where previously it was just pixels. SunRay thin clients got round to adding the X RENDER extension a couple of years ago, making the performance of GLib-based software on them merely sucky instead of snailishly unusable.

These problems, however, are not within Wayland's scope at present. Its design carefully leaves a clear field in which to fix them. And so long as workarounds like Xvnc and Xpra continue to work, we should at least not go backwards.

What's not to like? It seems to me that Wayland deserves our support and help during the inevitable teething issues rather than criticism.