The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 14:25 UTC (Sun) by mebrown (subscriber, #7960)In reply to: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix) by marcH
Parent article: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 16:20 UTC (Sun)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link] (12 responses)
You are assuming that merely stating a (non-negotiable) requirement is a critic.
> they are working towards a solution for VNC/remoting, that the solutions are more technically elegant, and that there are already prototypes?
Here it comes again: the good, old and infamous "more technically elegant prototype". Thanks for answering your question yourself.
I have an old & ugly product that just works. Why the hell would I switch to an elegant prototype? I'm not an X11 engineer, I'm just an X11 LUSER. God preserves my favourite distro from switching.
I feel really sorry for the Wayland developers that X11 raised the user expectations that high.
I mean, come on: we are talking about an important feature here and not asking for some obscure and crazy backward compatibility hack
I like LWN. I pay for it. I love the technically accurate and insightful articles *and comments*. The only thing that I find sometimes annoying is the inability of a large number of people in this crowd here to think outside the engineer box and put themselves in the shoes of a plain luser who wants important features not to break and to Just Keep Working.
Posted Jun 9, 2013 16:39 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (10 responses)
>I mean, come on: we are talking about an important feature here and not asking for some obscure and crazy backward compatibility hack
First, the old style X11 is not going away. It's going to be supported on Wayland for any foreseeable future, so you can "ssh -X" to your heart's delight in the next 10-something years.
Second, Wayland is not just something out of the blue. It's a logical evolution of real-world X11 usage patterns. It solves very real problems with X11.
Third, trying to preserve X11 will continue to make it more and more complicated and hard to support. Which will (at some point) make it impossible to add new features.
> put themselves in the shoes of a plain luser who wants important features not to break and to Just Keep Working.
Posted Jun 9, 2013 21:05 UTC (Sun)
by dig (guest, #91108)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 21:08 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 8:28 UTC (Tue)
by mmarq (guest, #2332)
[Link] (1 responses)
IF a dev codes for X, and he continues, wouldn't be much better to run it directly on X instead of a server on top of another ?
And yes i read all the arguments, but i see 2 trends developing for applications. One is Kronos the other is HSA, and they are some how very close related in many points.
Even Nvidia will eventually join(both) with their ARM push, and the same with Apple(LLVM is the dev base of HSA and Apple is LLVM). More dubious is Intel and Microsoft. The strength of X is not what lays ahead but the enormous baggage that lays behind... Why change ?... in a pure app POV what isn't broke don't fix it, the DS is *orthogonal*... so again why change ?
Is any of those DS , X, Wayland or Mir, going in the direction of the industry ?
(if i was an app dev right now, i would want it on Mac, Linux, Android and Windows etc... if possible... all this discussions and promises don't give me any incentive)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 17:18 UTC (Tue)
by Tobu (subscriber, #24111)
[Link]
Posted Jun 9, 2013 22:04 UTC (Sun)
by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
[Link]
I know. And the only thing harder than doing X is continuing to shoehorn new features into it as it goes along.
Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:08 UTC (Mon)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (4 responses)
You don't know much about X then.
X11 runs perfectly well on many operating systems besides Linux. Windows and OS X are both examples that are supported by Xorg's Xservers. In fact one of the biggest contributors to Xorg is Apple and they use that code directly in their X11 related Apple products.
I find it extremely unlikely that Wayland will be much harder to support then Windows or OS X is.
In fact how Wayland is designed it should simplify the functionality of Xservers for Linux massively.
Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:33 UTC (Mon)
by alankila (guest, #47141)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:26 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:46 UTC (Mon)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
There isn't many people clamoring for X11 support in any OS except Linux (or the BSDs), but it does exist.
Posted Jun 11, 2013 22:49 UTC (Tue)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link]
Because these servers are useful to run applications remotely of course.
Posted Jun 9, 2013 17:32 UTC (Sun)
by tpo (subscriber, #25713)
[Link]
:-))) ! Thanks,
Posted Jun 9, 2013 21:16 UTC (Sun)
by Mook (subscriber, #71173)
[Link] (4 responses)
Pretty much it keeps being described as a solution for VNC. From a user's point of view, VNC (/RFB) is horrible in that it is presented as a giant rectangular hole in which things show up, completely disconnected from the environment around it. In contrast, X can be forwarded without a root window so that things integrate well. If people start consistently describing the future Wayland solution without comparing it to VNC (even if it does do pixel scraping instead of sending drawing commands over), people like me will stop hating on it. As far as I can tell, this is the direction it's actually going anyway; it's just been a horrible communication problem because it's actually more VNC-like in a way that isn't quite as important to the user.
Posted Jun 10, 2013 1:21 UTC (Mon)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link] (3 responses)
Yeah, I cringe whenever I see the parallel to VNC brought up, because, as you point out, it makes all the wrong associations. The VNC user experience sucks. And by that, I mean the end-to-end user experience of someone who fires up a VNC client and VNC server overtop of the existing windowing environments. The one where you get a window that behaves as a (crappy) monitor and doesn't integrate well at all with a desktop environment. (For example, getting tons of spurious "Cannot empty clipboard" errors in Excel on my Windows box whenever I leave something in the selection buffer on my remote VNC'd X connection.) Wayland, so far as I've read and understood it, does not seek to replicate that in any way. Using communication model with async, timestamped requests and a focus on shipping bitmaps for windows instead of drawing primitives seems like a reasonable model these days for shipping a window from one machine to another. This model bears some resemblance to how VNC forwards an entire screen from one end to another, and keyboard/mouse inputs back the other way, but as I understand it, Wayland will just do this for individual windows. Sounds entirely reasonable to me, and perhaps provide the best of both. Also sounds like it's less likely to hit snags, such as my fonts disagreeing between two machines leading to software looking weird. I'm personally avoiding getting too excited (positive or negative) about Wayland until it gets to a point where it's worth it for me to give it a spin around the block, and that means finding it in a distro somewhere. I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm a little skeptical about some things, but I'm reserving judgment until later.
Posted Jun 10, 2013 9:16 UTC (Mon)
by blackwood (guest, #44174)
[Link] (2 responses)
What's holding things up is simply that other stuff is currently a higher priority (like plugging the holes in the input layer for input methods and fleshing out the window display mode a bit). But I guess it'll all be in place when desktops environments have working Wayland code, together with XWayland and all the other pieces we need to have for a well-working full-fledged Wayland desktop.
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:20 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
I am told that in order to get such a rare and obscure use case to work I have to wait for toolkit-level remoting, which is as far as I can tell a complete mirage: nobody is working on it, nobody is planning to work on it, if people do work on it their work for distinct toolkits will be totally uncoordinated (natch), why aren't you happy with VNC-style bitmap shuffling nobody needs to scroll windows full of text anyway.
Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:14 UTC (Wed)
by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
[Link]
Again, this is completely false.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
In many cases Wayland developers _are_ X11 developers.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
You're wrong on so many levels...
They have. So X11 won't be broken. Your apps won't go away. Keep calm and continue working.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Devs code for toolkits: SDL, Gtk, Qt, or even more high-level. One of the toolkits' jobs is to provide portability (though apps will use platform calls when the toolkits are weak on that front). I don't think a brand-new Kronos standard will displace them.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
*t
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
The end result is pretty impressive.
Except if you want to scroll windows full of text, since that means repainting the entire screen rather than erasing a line from the top, shuffling the rest up, and painting a line at the bottom (or vice versa), since it has no understanding of the semantics of scrolling.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)