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

Posted Jun 14, 2013 6:33 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720)
In reply to: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix) by ajmacleod
Parent article: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

> 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" :)