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The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 9, 2013 16:20 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix) by mebrown
Parent article: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

> Why would you continue to make this criticism of Wayland...

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
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

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.


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The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 9, 2013 16:39 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

> I feel really sorry for the Wayland developers that X11 raised the user expectations that high.
In many cases Wayland developers _are_ X11 developers.

>I mean, come on: we are talking about an important feature here and not asking for some obscure and crazy backward compatibility hack
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
You're wrong on so many levels...

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.
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)

Posted Jun 9, 2013 21:05 UTC (Sun) by dig (guest, #91108) [Link] (9 responses)

Too many promises... X isn't easy peace of software, especially the one to emulate it on totally different concepts Wayland uses. Only the future will tell...

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 9, 2013 21:08 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

X on Wayland is easy. You just run a rootless server with a Wayland backend. Exactly as you would do it on Windows and Mac OS.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 11, 2013 8:28 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] (1 responses)

So what is the point of Wayland ?

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)

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 11, 2013 17:18 UTC (Tue) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

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)

Posted Jun 9, 2013 22:04 UTC (Sun) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

> X isn't easy peace of software

I know. And the only thing harder than doing X is continuing to shoehorn new features into it as it goes along.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:08 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (4 responses)

> Too many promises... X isn't easy peace of software, especially the one to emulate it on totally different concepts Wayland uses. Only the future will tell...

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.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:33 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (3 responses)

Hm. What X11 related products do Apple have now? They aren't even shipping an X server anymore.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:26 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Apple ships X server as a separate download. I'm using it extensively to run wireshark.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:46 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Yep, http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5293

There isn't many people clamoring for X11 support in any OS except Linux (or the BSDs), but it does exist.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 11, 2013 22:49 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

X servers with few applications, how come?

Because these servers are useful to run applications remotely of course.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 9, 2013 17:32 UTC (Sun) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]

> God preserves my favourite distro from switching

:-))) ! Thanks,
*t


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