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

Posted Jun 13, 2013 16:40 UTC (Thu) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729)
Parent article: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

More of the same hype and FUD which I find very tiresome indeed. Wayland is held up as some kind of saviour which is going to fix everything in the *nix display world and be far better than X in every way.

I hate this baby-out-with-the-bathwater attitude which seems to be infecting the free software world; we're expected to hail the new wonder child as our saviour who promises to do all kinds of things better when in fact it _does not_ and might well never do.

Maybe Wayland will be everything that X is now and better... I'll believe it when I see the proof and will be sad if, as I suspect, that day never comes but X is reduced to unsupported abandonware and we have to live with something actually less useful.

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

Posted Jun 14, 2013 6:33 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (2 responses)

> if, as I suspect, that day never comes but X is reduced to unsupported abandonware and we have to live with something actually less useful

or "just" take over maintenance of X when it's abandoned.That should be easy, right ?

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

Posted Jun 14, 2013 13:33 UTC (Fri) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (1 responses)

No - because by that point some of the most useful applications will depend on some Wayland feature and so there won't be a lot of point in maintaining X; we'll be more or less forced to live with Wayland whether or not it's better.

Note that I _hope_ this doesn't happen and that Wayland really does do everything X does but better... I just don't like the way it's been pushed so far, it brings to mind gnome 3 and Windows 8 / Metro amongst others...

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

Posted Jun 14, 2013 14:09 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

> by that point some of the most useful applications will depend on some Wayland feature

Programs mostly use Qt/GTK/EFL and OpenGL or things like SDL. Those are the parts that decide if an application is compatible with a display infrastructure (X, Wayland,... well, even Mir).

Your program looses compatibility with X when the library you use does. Some are built so that the display backend can be choosen at runtime. From what I see, one backend will be deleted with a commit message like "this has been broken for two years and nobody even noticed".

I expect Xwayland to keep working for a very long time. I hope because I still hope to play the handful of linux native games I own.

Of course, compatibility is never an easy thing. You *can* expect things to break from time to time if nobody tests and reports less used backends.

> it brings to mind gnome 3 and Windows 8 / Metro

Different things.
Gnome3/Metro are (AFAIK, I never used Metro) user interface and user visible changes.
X->Wayland is a technical change. The user should be (ideally) presented exactly the same UI with Wayland that it was with X.
There will be minor (for the user) changes, like the way screensavers/screenlock and screenshot functionalities are exepcted to change, but apart that, the user should not see anything different (except early adopter, those who test, report etc.)

Yes, I'm aware of my heavy use of "should" :)

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

Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:23 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (2 responses)

I think anyone would be hard pressed to call it 'throw[ing] the baby out with the bathwater'.

In the 26 years since X11's initial release, it's gained multi-output support (four times), multi-input-device support (three times), hotplugging for both, a new keyboard model, a compositing model, a new rendering model, direct OpenGL rendering support (twice), indirect OpenGL rendering, accelerated indirect OpenGL rendering, a new font rendering model including anti-aliasing (three-ish times), autoconfiguration support, an acceleration architecture (four-ish times), Display PostScript support (later removed), a print server (also later removed, thank god), and has been ported to everything from mobile phones to renderfarms.

So how you can essentially accuse us of not having trying, and done this frivolously, is beyond me.

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

Posted Jun 20, 2013 13:54 UTC (Thu) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (1 responses)

I didn't accuse anyone of "not trying"; I've said repeatedly that I hope Wayland does do everything X is actually used for today and does it better. I'm just a bit weary of a particular type of approach which seems quite common at the moment where a replacement for some piece of technology is wheeled out at the barely usable prototype stage, claimed to be the one true way with all that went before being completely broken and to be abandoned... while the replacement doesn't actually DO everything that its predecessor did.

Nobody has claimed that X is perfect, but I do claim that it does absolutely everything I want it to do, does it without any fuss and has done so for a decade and a half (over which time the things I've been actually using it for have changed quite a bit.) Remote X display has never, ever been a "nightmare" for me, or for anyone I know - frankly I've always considered it verging on the miraculous! If X has problems, which I'm not disputing, they're at a level where _users_ don't see them. I wish the Wayland developers all the best, and if they can make it all work as well and transparently as X currently does I'll be very happy!

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

Posted Jun 20, 2013 15:34 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

This is all worth highlighting and is a gem of this discussion.

> technology is wheeled out at the barely usable prototype stage, claimed to be the one true way with all that went before being completely broken and to be abandoned

Some of that is just a consequence of open development, by definition you have the software before it is in a "finished" state, and see the dark corners as it is being made. Often the software isn't really "done" or "ready" until after several iterations of release, sometimes spanning years, and everyone has to suffer through the iterations until it works the way it should. See GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, they really didn't get into their stride with feature completeness until after the .8 or .10 release.

> completely broken and to be abandoned... while the replacement doesn't actually DO everything that its predecessor did

Some times things are replaced without knowing why the old thing did the things it did, google "mjg59 lighdm" for a good example of that. Unfortunately there sometimes isn't enough manpower for parallel development and maintenance.

> Remote X display has never, ever been a "nightmare" for me, or for anyone I know - frankly I've always considered it verging on the miraculous! If X has problems, which I'm not disputing, they're at a level where _users_ don't see them

And that is due to the very hard work of people like Keith Packard and Daniel Stone and all the X.org team. They have busted their butts over the years trying to make X not suck so that you and I could be blissfully unaware of the contortions and brokenness behind the scenes. It's a testament to their success and hard work that people don't believe them when they say that X11 is fundamentally broken.