LCA: The ways of Wayland
LCA: The ways of Wayland
Posted Feb 15, 2013 22:24 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)In reply to: LCA: The ways of Wayland by Serge
Parent article: LCA: The ways of Wayland
> 2. X.Org is running as Wayland client. Meaning, Wayland talks to hardware, X.Org talks to Wayland, and all X11 apps run through such X11-to-Wayland proxy.
Yes. X11 apps run on an X11 server with Wayland being the backing graphics output and key/mouse input.
> It takes a lot of effort to support such a monster as wayland compositor. So only big players like Gnome and KDE will stay alive. Others will die.
That seems unlikely. Wayland should be easier to make a window manager/compositor for than X11 because it has a sane design. I expect there to continue to be a robust assortment of Wayland compositors with various behaviors, some ported from X11 window managers, some based on Weston. It would make sense to build from the reference Weston implementation rather than writing your own from scratch.
> Under X11, if somebody wants to write a cool dockbar he can just write it. He don't have to patch Gnome/KDE/X.Org. And he can use it anywhere, in Gnome, KDE or OpenBox
That's not really true, X11 doesn't have any support for dockbars and the like, what there is are standards hammered out over the years by the window manager makers for dockbars and other apps to signal what they expect so that the window manager knows where to put them, not to put borders on them, etc. So they did have to "patch" gnome/kde/xorg to make this work, and continue to make new standards at freedesktop.org for new use cases, you can't take that effort for granted and claim that Wayland would be any different.
> If he wants to write a WM he's free to do it (IIRC, it takes ~50 lines of code for a basic WM)
I call BS, a window manager which supports all the relevant standards you just talked about previously takes far far far more than 50 LoC and has to spend a huge amount of effort to work around unfixable bugs and legacy behaviors because of X11. Nothing is straightforward or easy at this level. All of the logic for how your desktop work is in the window manager.
> Under Wayland one can't just write a dockbar. He must integrate it with some compositor.
That's not any different than X11 for the reasons I mentioned before
> And even if his patches were accepted by e.g. kwin, his dockbar will work under kwin only, but not under weston.
I would expect new versions of the relevant standards that these window managers, such as kwin, already support. It may be even easier than that, much of the expected behavior may just work with very little modification when porting existing desktops to Wayland. I wouldn't expect the major window manager/compositors to radically change their behavior when moving to Wayland, just to spite each other or something.
> X.Org is a pearl of Linux world. It's extremely flexible, whatever you want you can do that.
...
> X.Org just works.
Not really, the people who maintain that fiction for you have very strongly disagreed, which is why they have created Wayland.
> Are you still saying that there will be X11 support in wayland? And what is it going to be used for?
Yes, of course. X11 will continue to work much the same way it does now into the distant future to support all those 10+ year old applications you may want to run.
> Wayland bring fragmentation to Linux. Under wayland almost everything is compositor-specific. Since it's really hard to make a good compositor, there's going to be just a few of them, and soft written for one compositor, won't work under another one.
Not really true on any point. This will not be any different than today, compatibility is not a function of X11 vs. Wayland but of the window manager/compositor makers like KDE/GNOME/XFCE/Openbox/etc. in having standards. I wouldn't expect anything substantial to change on this front.
Posted Feb 16, 2013 2:11 UTC (Sat)
by Serge (guest, #84957)
[Link] (2 responses)
Hm... Modern cars are very complex, so many buttons, so many parts, they take too much space, require too much fuel, and they were designed ages ago! There's a fundamental flaw: they have 4 wheels. That's too much, people don't need so many wheels. Let's fix that! I present you... unicycle. It's simple, easy to use, takes little space, has just a few parts, easy to support. It has sane design.
Of course that's sarcasm. But still, Wayland design is simple, that does not make it sane. For example client side decorations make sane tiling (and many other things) impossible.
> I expect there to continue to be a robust assortment of Wayland compositors with various behaviors, some ported from X11 window managers, some based on Weston. It would make sense to build from the reference Weston implementation rather than writing your own from scratch.
Forking and patching Weston is not that simple. But even if people start forking Weston to implement dockbars, WMs, etc. you end up choosing between Wayland compositors with nice WM, nice dockbars, nice theming support OR nice workspaces. And you'll have to choose only one of them. Do you call that sane design?
> That's not really true, X11 doesn't have any support for dockbars and the like
X11 does have that support (EWMH). By "support" I mean ability to implement it without having to patch X.Org or write protocol extensions. X11 is so good that it allows me to do that.
> standards hammered out over the years by the window manager makers for dockbars and other apps
That's what I was talking about! Yes, if I was inventing dockbar, I would have to write a standard for that. But it's already done, ~20 years ago. And now Wayland makes everybody to reinvent the wheels, spend 10 more years to write all those standards again. From scratch. But use extensions, outside of Wayland. Because core Wayland protocol does not allow that by design.
> a window manager which supports all the relevant standards you just talked about previously takes far far far more than 50 LoC
I just tried TinyWM (which is ~50 lines) and it works. :) Well, I had to unbind Alt+F1 to make it work. As for some actually useful WMs, there's DWM. Yes, it's about 40 times larger than TinyWM, but it's 20 times smaller than Weston and has many features that Weston does not.
> I would expect new versions of the relevant standards that these window managers, such as kwin, already support.
That's it! Wayland is useless as it is now. It's just a toy, like TinyWM. To make it useful you NEED all those standards. After ~10 more years new compositor-related standards will appear, and "simple wayland protocol" will slowly turn into "core wayland protocol + extensions + standards". But hey, X11 is "core protocol + extensions + standards". Why breaking everything and inventing another X11 if we already have X11?
Posted Feb 16, 2013 3:58 UTC (Sat)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
I'm not sure what more can be said, others can decide for themselves whether you've addressed my points or I've addressed yours and whose version of reality is most likely to be predictive and useful
Posted Feb 16, 2013 9:50 UTC (Sat)
by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
[Link]
> Why breaking everything and inventing another X11 if we already have X11?
Keep using X, then. It's not going to stop existing, and with all its advantages it sounds like it's going to be much better for you.
LCA: The ways of Wayland
LCA: The ways of Wayland
LCA: The ways of Wayland