KDE Plans To Support Wayland In 2012 413
An anonymous reader writes "During the 2011 Desktop Summit plans were brought up by a KDE developer to support KDE on the Wayland Display Server, which is dubbed the successor to X11. The KDE Wayland support is expected to come in three phases, with the first two phases expected to be completed next year during the KDE SC 4.8 and 4.9 development cycles. Farewell X?"
Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a mistake! X is one of the most flexible and useful systems today. Granted dumb users won't ever realize what they have in front of them, but the utility of X should not be under-estimated. I DO use it on a regular basis. Eliminating X, or even making it a second class citizen, is a huge loss in the philosophy that has allowed UNIX to survive for decades.
What will happen is that X will be "supported" as an X emulation layer on top of the latest display layer. Unfortunately, apps will abandon X because it will no longer be vigorously supported. Then it will be lost.
Here's what X can do today that we will lose: Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another. This is not the same as VNC or terminal services.
I hear all the dumbed down Linux users saying, that this isn't important, but like the people making these decisions, it is the point of view of ignorance. Computers are going in two directions..... Smaller devices and huge systems with many virtual machines. The huge systems with many virtual machines SCREAMS X for application display management. a 1:1 virtual desktop per virtual machine us unmanageable, but a window per app is. Eventually, there will only be a para-virtual manager and para-virtualized machines, each running apps. The VMs can be saved, restored, snap-shotted, backed-up, branched, etc. This will be the nature of how we run apps when we have a huge number of CPUs. X is a better fit now for the future, than any Windows/Mac inspired "improvement."
This is another Ill that is a direct result of people coming to Linux from a Mac or Windows background. They want to bring lesser ideas because they don't understand the capabilities of what they already have.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not too sure what the actual use-cases driving it are, either. Is there anybody who's really that excited about fancy graphical window effects, except as a curiosity? The article mentions Compiz developers having trouble getting patches merged, which I hope is not the main driver--- the main thing holding back Linux on the desktop is not insufficiently fancy animations when you minimize a window.
I don't get it either, where is the benefit? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm an old fart, but as far as I'm concerned a computer is a tool to accomplish a goal not an end in itself. I use a computer to get work done, or for entertainment. In both activities I couldn't care less about the computer itself, as long as it is efficient and stays out of the way.
Now look at the trends today. Every major window manager seems thoroughly convinced that mo' shiny is mo' better. Transparant everything, all-singing all-dancing window animations. Very clever stuff, but does it help me get my
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Nobody's forcing updates on you, old timer.
Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody's forcing updates on you, old timer.
Sure. Except that you do want to get security fixes. And you probably also want to run a few new applications.
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What? yes, updates are forced on everyone, eventually.
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X is the underling tech that displays all those new shiny borked GUI's and your old favorites too, it sort of needs to go because it rarely gets used for what its intended and is a big bloated overcomplicated pain in the ass for normal desktop use!
now the optimal time to do that would have been a decade or more ago when it took unholy matters of hell to get X working worth a shit on older machines, now whats the point we all have at least a quarter gig of ram and a 1+Ghz cpu and X is just a tiny tidbit
Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
You should not condition the capabilities of a system on the capabilities of its least experienced users.
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Well, I agree with you. Except that transparency in my desktop helps me get my work done faster. First off, if it's opaque, it's got focus. And that is something I can say on many layers: the window with the WM's concept of "focus" (where keystrokes go) is displayed opaquely, but because it's opaque, it naturally gets my attention and focus. The time I spend guessing which window has focus is reduced. I know that, in the past, the window's title bar would show whether that window had focus or not, but w
Old Fart here again (Score:3, Insightful)
Hi, Old Fart here again.
I know I don't have to follow in step with what the big distro's are doing. I assume most developers will follow with the new paradigms. So how long before applications start to rely on Wayland? How long before they just don't run on X or only via some emulation layer that breaks more things than it solves? It is just a matter of time.
Sure, I could stop updating my applications and use them as they are now. I still use xfig for diagrams so in a way that's not a new concept. It would
Re:I don't get it either, where is the benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I checked, nobody was forcing you to switch from X to Wayland or Gnome 2 to 3.
And nobody forced me to switch from GNOME 1.4 to GNOME 2, right? Or from browsers that support HTML 1 to HTML 5? Or from FTP+{IPSec|SSL} to SFTP?Wherever the most users are, that's where developers will go. Developer time is a finite resource, and any time developers go somewhere, they have to leave something behind.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't move to new systems, but there are very stable and usable features in old systems which don't exist in new systems, and there's always some cost..
Some apps written for GNOME 1.4 were never ported to GNOME 2, because their developers abandoned them. (I can't think of examples off-hand, I just recall encountering the problem at the time of transition) HTML 1 was a very simple, straightforward means of conveying information for rendering and presenting to humans. It just wasn't fancy enough, so it was replaced. Did you know that FTP allows you to instruct one FTP server to transfer a file to another? That's pretty epic when the two servers have a connection 10-100 times as fast as your connection to either--and tools like IPSec, SSL or a secured layer 2 made that reasonably safe.
Yes, each of these older systems had their own faults, and newer versions sought to cope with those faults, but new versions often fail to retain the flexibility and existing utility of old versions. I shudder to think how many hours of coder's times are spent shoehorning existing things into new systems or on top of new paradigms. Worse, everybody thinks they've invented something new, when all they've done is (often inadvertently) re-invented something a decade or six old in a new context.
It feels like make-work for a stagnant field. Pay someone to tear down the old road and build a new road, except the new road isn't even expected to last as long. We're not accelerating innovation as fast as we tend to think, we're stuck in a mud puddle and spinning our wheels.
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You have four options:
1. Complain about people who want the "fancy animations" and end up losing X11. Let's face it, it's rare for people to complain their way into a mutually beneficial situation. This seems to be the option everyone is going for at the moment...
2. Help X11 by fixing what people perceive to be wrong with it. Maybe then you'll also see how bloated and painful it is to work with X11... (ultimately, that's the REAL reason we're seeing a rise of Wayland). You don't have to agree, you just have
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What's bloated and slow about X11? Aside from crappy drivers (for some people), most of the slow issues have been fixed. Bloat is commonly levelled at X11, but it's not really substantiated.
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x11 in general - seems to work just fine. remote x11, especially over a high latency link... ouch.
it is an extremely chatty protocol and, as far as i know, no reasonable caching is built-in.
granted, for the time it was developed (and for local use today) it was just fine. but i have to use remote x fairly often over slow connections. well, not really, i'm using nx (because plain x is totally unusable) - but that's closing source and it's session management is extremely terrible.
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I wish that you had posted this from a logged in account, so that I could friend you.
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The main problem with Wayland is that it will force a hard reset of device drivers.
The state of Linux device drivers will be reset back to 1994. Any progress that has been made in those intervening years will be flushed straight down the toilet. Whatever advantage you gain from flushing X will be undone by poor quality of drivers and incomplete feature support.
Re:Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
How many drivers for graphics cards no longer sold, but still in use, will be updated to use KMS?
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Help X11 by fixing what people perceive to be wrong with it. Maybe then you'll also see how bloated and painful it is to work with X11... (ultimately, that's the REAL reason we're seeing a rise of Wayland). You don't have to agree, you just have to realize that the people who disagree with you are about to overpower your choice. The mantra of "well, if they want it (the fancy animations), they should add it to X11 themselves or shut up" has failed you. Instead, someone has written an increasingly viable alternative which lacks features YOU want. Which leads me to ...
This would be counterproductive. By far the most common complaint I see about X is "OMG IT'S SLOW BECAUSE IT ALWAYS RUNS OVER THE NETWORK!!!!!!!!". However, on a local display, X uses a domain socket for communication, basically the fastest method available. So, the perceived problem isn't actually a problem at all, "fixing" it would be a mistake.
As far as I can tell, anyone who's backing Wayland has no actual concrete complaints about X, they just feel the need to rewrite everything from scratch (a common problem, unfortunately [wikipedia.org]). Furthermore, in all I've read about Wayland, it doesn't bring anything to the table except fewer features and newer (buggier) code.
I don't know if you've noticed, but KDE and Gnome (and others) already have lots of fancy animations, and they didn't need to rewrite X to get it done.
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Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not only about some specific effects but also about having a generally smooth and intuitive desktop experience. Plus it's nice to have the small flicker here and there eliminated which rids the traditional desktops.
But you can get that with X11. Intuition is not built at the basic graphics library layer anyway, and never ever was (it resides at a higher level). Smooth running? That again is a matter of correct programming (e.g., getting the handling of buffers right) as the fact that some X11 apps have been running smoothly for decades will testify. Going to Wayland will not fix these sorts of problems.
OTOH, there are things that it will fix. For example, it's finally just about becoming limiting that window dimensions have to fit in 16 bits. And it will also mean that some legacy nastiness can be dropped. (I so wish I'd never had to understand the mess that is visuals. Complex, confusing and long obsolete.)
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
I have seen video of Keith Packard's talk which was providing quite a lot of reasons why Wayland or something similar is the way to go forward. The talk was centered on X protocol and architecture and how it works for modern applications. (Executive summary: very poorly.)
One of the main points was that most applications (both KDE and GNOME) do not use X anymore. Largest part of X is related to the 2D graphics and font rendering. Yet, most applications do not use X for that anymore and render everything by themselves, sending to X only the final image to display. X became a simple display driver with a fancy network interface. Why the layer is needed at all?
Another memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.
So those behind Wayland are not only bubbling windows fanatics - but also people who want to stream-line Linux' graphics stack.
P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.
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So somebody that has not even heard of the root window is trying to tell us all what X can or can't do and getting it wrong?
BTW, the gnome and kde comments also show a lack of understanding - there's more to X than a widget set and ultimately the important thing is getting the images from whatever to where the user can see it.
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Fullscreen has never worked satisfactorily for me, personally. There would always be some weirdness which made it practically useless.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
So somebody that has not even heard of the root window is trying to tell us all what X can or can't do and getting it wrong?
I'm pretty sure Keith Packard, as a lead of X.org, has heard of the root window.
Here is the video I was referring to: X and the future of Linux Graphics. [blip.tv]
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, interesting; thanks for the link. I hadn't realized that the X.org people are moving in the same direction. Doing a bit of googling, this LWN article [lwn.net] summarizes a Packard talk from last year that seems to be hitting some similar points.
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In that case, I say let the linux zealots do wayland but give us X. They are clearly in not-invented-here syndrome. I'm tired of it. More and more free desktop projects are under the GPL. If they want to do wayland, just go in a corner and do it. Don't screw everyone else in the process. By everyone, I mean all non Linux users. (yes even windows users have x-windows servers available)
There is a clear need for non linux people to take leadership in Xorg as well as starting a graphical desktop environme
Re:Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, if this is the case, why is Wayland ignoring network transparency? Fine, the X rendering layer isn't used anymore and should go away; maybe the entirety of X should go away; why does it immediately follow that network transparency should go away? Don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
That's funny, I could have sworn I used to run all sorts of games full screen, across multiple monitors no less, since at least 2001. And yes, this was Linux with X11, with games that made heavy use of OpenGL (NWN, Unreal, etc).
Fine, but I ask again - why does network transparency have to go? I might be more convinced that those behind Wayland weren't bubbling Windows fanatics if their solution to the remote GUI apps problem wasn't the same as Windows and MacOSX. No, remote desktops in their own window *isn't* good enough. If I really wanted that, I can *choose* it, but I'm not *forced* to run remote GUI apps that way.
And this exact same feeling is why others are wailing so loudly against Wayland.
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I'm pretty sure they say it's a low priority because X is still the common use for that. First priority is to get the thing viable in the most common situation, using X for network transparency. There's no reason a display server can't be both wayland and X at the same time.
That doesn't mean they're not thinking about network transparency, but just making it a "TO DO".
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I'm familiar with RDP; that's the protocol Windows Terminal Services has used for years. I hadn't heard about SPICE, though.SPICE looks nice, but which version (or which extensions) of RDP is to be used?
Furthermore, my day job has had me spend many hours writing high-performance C++ code for Win32. RDP is a PITA. For applications which are already running, it pulls tricks like changing the display depth on-the-fly. We had to fall back to using GDI+ (which is slow, but hardware thankfully caught up) to maint
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Re:Stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's what X can do today that we will lose: Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another. This is not the same as VNC or terminal services.
Lately I have it not work for me pretty often. Especially if there's any OpenGL. I can have two machines with GLX on them and yet my application crashes when I try to display it on the remote one... practically ANYTHING using OpenGL asplodes. Any more, that's the only thing I want to display remotely, because any old janky computer has enough power to run apps locally. It's not like when I was having to run Netscape on Linux displayed back to my SLC because it didn't have the power to run it satisfactorily.
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Any more, that's the only thing I want to display remotely, because any old janky computer has enough power to run apps locally.
Sometimes, power doesn't matter. I can't run mythtv-setup locally. Unfortunately, its the only way I know of to configure a mythtv-backend, and its a X11 GUI. My mythtv-backend doesn't even have a graphics card, certainly not the mandatory $500 super 3-d type you'd need, and I'd not want to remove a tuner card to plug in a fancy 3-d card, just for occasional channel lineup changes...
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But that's a retarded failing of MythTV that can be worked around with X11 as a band-aid... I mean, that's clearly not the Unix Way (tm) :)
Do you really need a fancy graphics card just to run MythTV?
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But that's a retarded failing of MythTV that can be worked around with X11 as a band-aid...
And after X11 is gotten rid of, and there is no bandaid... The only benefit the GUI provides over a config file is its semi-adaptive. From memory, you set up the capture card, THEN it shows up as an option in the thingy that links cap card hardware to channel lineups or whatever. The only benefit the GUI provides over a text CLI is during channel icon selection. The only benefit the GUI provides over a web based interface, is you don't need to set up / maintain / security patch a web server and some oper
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No, Wayland makes all that stuff possible, but there is absolutely nothing preventing the implementation of a frame buffer interface drawn by the CPU. And by the same token, nothing preventing exporting Wayland to X (or VNC, or...) through a similar mechanism.
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As for never having to run remote apps - bullshit. Do you think those 48 CPU boxes are running on peoples desks?
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So... Now that we know what X has that Wayland lacks, we are halfay there. What does Wayland has that X lacks? I personally don't know.
When we'll know that, we'll be able to express an informed opinion.
Anyone care to jump in to enlighten us?
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a myth that Wayland lacks network transparency. It currently doesn't DEFINE it, but it doesn't LACK it. That may sound like a semantic game, but it's the same as saying that X11 lacks policy, which is imposed by the window manager, a separate program. Wayland provides drawing surfaces to applications and then composites them onto the screen. There are many different ways in which the drawing surfaces can get moved from the client to the server for display. Locally, they're the same memory space. With remote applications, you can either move pixels, or you can have the rendering API send commands over the network.
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It's a myth that Wayland lacks network transparency. It currently doesn't DEFINE it, but it doesn't LACK it.
OMG, that is the worst twist of logic that I have ever seen. That's like saying my Jeep doesn't lack flight, it just doesn't define or come with wings. NOT HAVING IT AS A DEMONSTRABLE DESIGN GOAL MEANS THAT IT DOESN'T HAVE IT. In other words, Wayland lacks network transparency.
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No, the parent is right. All wayland cares about is that it gets pixmaps for window contents. It doesn't matter where they come from. It's underspecified, and therefore open to be implemented in a wide variety of ways. The same is not true for your jeep.
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Wayland uses X for "network transparency".
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"Wayland uses X for "network transparency"."
And since X will no longer be maintained so much for that.
Need examples of lack of maintenance: User level display drivers, xfree86, etc.
Everyone of value will jump and X will die a slow death of bitrot.
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It's already effectively network transparent because it still uses a client-server architecture. The fact that it doesn't specify the details in the core implementation makes it more flexible with network transparency, not less.
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Yes. And it took them about 10 or 15 years of retrofitting it to get it right too.
RDP doesn't demonstrate that the design of Wayland can be half-assed. RDP demonstrates why key X features are still relevant. In fact, they are more relevant than ever.
If anything, the rest of the world has come around to our way of thinking and now we want to abandon it in favor something like VNC running on top of MacOS which is even uglier than what we have now.
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This is a mistake! X is one of the most flexible and useful systems today.
It's also decades old and full of cruft, does no longer properly model how our hardware works and only held together by an endless number of extensions.
Run applications on one virtual or physical machine and display on another.
Yeah and as soon as you want something more complicated, such as move an application from one display to another while its already running you run into issues. Something simple as changing color depth at runtime, something that Windows could do since at least Win98, if not already Win95, is still impossible in X11. The reason why I can't use the scroll wheel
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As someone who constantly uses Xnest and Xming on a daily bases I say, you tell them mlwmohawk! There is NO other GUI environment that allows applications from several different machines in different locations to run seamlessly on the desktop. I currently have two sessions of Code::Blocks up. One is from my server development machine. The other is on the client development machine. I also have an application running on a third machine that controls VMs (4 attackers and 4 victims) set up to send traffic
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This is a mistake! X is one of the most flexible and useful systems today.
This is another Ill that is a direct result of people coming to Linux from a Mac or Windows background. They want to bring lesser ideas because they don't understand the capabilities of what they already have.
You are right and I agree with you be, shit son, if ever there was a useful piece of software that needed a massive overhaul/refactor it is X11. Don't get me wrong I love what I can do with X11 but it is a world unto itself in terms of understanding it. Configuring X11 is so fucking frustrating and it was one of the things I would dread when re-installing a Linux box and one of the big reasons I switched to Ubuntu, there are some things I just couldn't be bothered doing and I just want it to work and not ha
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...and all of this ranting argues for an overhaul of xorg rather than dumping it.
Although why you would need to bother with X config files in this day and age is a bit of a mystery.
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I am one of the "dumb" users who don't need network transparency for their display servers, but if I remember right X Server does run as a client to Wayland. In this sense I would not call it an emulation layer, but rather an abstraction layer.
The use case you mention is very real and ubiquitous in everyday situations. The computers in my university labs just cannot work without X. I am pretty sure it will not die out.
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If you need X11 run X11. If you want to do advanced 3d desktop effects, don't. However, remote display has moved on since X11 was designed.
X11 can do remote display of apps running on a server, but it carries with it 20 years+ of baggage for functionality that perhaps 1-2% of users will ever use.
Besides, there are better ways of supporting X11. Personally i would suggest that the way forward is to move to wayland and then implement an X11 layer on top. Like the Mac UI has. I can run remote X11 stu
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I have no problems with a modern interface, as long as this doesn't mean taking essential features away. And yes, I do consider network transparency essential.
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This can be bolted onto wayland without issue if it is required. See the X11 utility in OS X, or one of the myriad of X servers on Windows for examples. This way you can have a clean interface for the funky composting desktop, and lay X11 on top. Given that you're going to be running X11 soley for the remote display aspect, the minute performance hit you MAY get due to running via wayland instead of on bare metal will be un noticeable due to the network traffic in any case.
And thats discounting the fa
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You won't gain anything from Wayland, but you'll lose the ability to run any apps that require Wayland without using window compositing anymore, including losing the ability to run on hardware that doesn't support OpenGL, as well as stuff like network transparency...
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I would be the last to deny that X11 has served us loyally and well for decades, but if the user expects a more modern interface, there is little point in attempting to stop the tide.
When did you start using Linux? What was your previous computer OS?
There is NOTHING provided in Wayland that can't be done in X. Furthermore, Wayland is temporary. It will not scale to the many para-virtualized environment described. The "desktop" is dying, and this is only one last chance for idiots to make Linux irrelevant. With X, Linux will be ideally suited for the computers to come.
Stop the tide? Well, ignorance sure is corrosive, I'll give you that.
Re:Not so stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
X is far from perfect (and I say this as someone who's written a compositing WM). There is a huge amount of the X11 protocol that no one actually uses anymore. Font rendering, for example, has to be done on the client or you get different sets of fonts for remote X11 (yuck!). For fast text rendering, you use the XRENDER extension, and store glyphs in the server then composite them. That takes care of text, but what about line drawings? X has basic drawing primitives, but most apps use something like Cairo to give a PostScript / PDF style drawing API, and Cairo doesn't use any of the X drawing primitives. It just draws everything into a pixmap and then sends it to the X server. This means that most of what people are actually using X for is getting a window that they can composite pixmaps into. And X sucks at that. The input model is also pretty horrible (take a look at how click-to-focus is implemented some time, it will make your brain hurt).
The problem with Wayland is that it doesn't seem much better. It's thinner, which is nice, but that's about it. It's also Linux-only (while X.org runs on all *NIX systems, plus Windows), and it is released under a less permissive license than X.org.
Re:Not so stupid. (Score:4, Informative)
Well, you can move things into the X server, but currently X doesn't support anything like the functionality that cairo needs. There is no X command for drawing a bezier path. There isn't even an X primitive for drawing an antialiased line. That's why people use things like Cairo.
Now, ideally, I'd like something a bit more like Apple's display server, where PDF-like commands are streamed directly to the display server, which can then do the 2D rendering and compositing. One of the first things I'd do if I were implementing X12 is ditch all of the existing X11 drawing commands and add most of the PDF 1.4 operators - in fact, the set that the HTML 5 canvas tag exposes to JavaScript would do very nicely.
Re:Not so stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
NeWS and Display PostScript were very similar, but there were some differences. NeWS encouraged you to write entire view objects in PostScript. This was a bitch to maintain, but it was great for remote display. With NeWS, you clicked on a button and it ran a PostScript program showing the button in the pressed state and sent a message to the remote machine saying the button had been pressed. With DPS and X11, you click on a button, and it sends a 'mouse click at coordinates x, y' message to the remote server. The remote machine then sends back drawing commands to produce a pressed button. Over a slow link, this means that NeWS buttons respond immediately, while X11 / DPS buttons respond after 100+ms. The closest thing we have now is the web. The canvas tag and JavaScript basically provide a modern version of NeWS.
DPS was a bit different, and Apple ditched the programmability entirely when they moved to the PDF rendering model in Quartz. This means that the interface is simpler - you no longer need an interpreter in the display server - and the addition of all of the compositing stuff meant that you could do much better raster displays.
Given that PDF is actually quite a dense format already, I'd be tempted to simply define the wire protocol for drawing as encapsulated PDF objects. This would let you store any sequence of drawing commands (e.g. a button shape, a text glyph composed of bezier curves, or an image) on the display server trivially and then redraw it at the current position with just a single command. It would be really easy to implement this with the canvas tag, so you could have a simple display server implemented in a web browser using WebSocket for remote display anywhere, and a proper native version for local and remote display.
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The LGPL doesn't stop it, but the general policy for X.org has always been not to allow code under anything more restrictive than the X11 license. The LGPL is more restrictive than the X11 license, so this is a problem. Wayland is under the same license, which could also be problematic on embedded devices, where the LGPL's requirement to be able to relink may not be possible to support.
That said, a quick and dirty implementation of the PDF rendering model wouldn't be too difficult, and Cairo could be an
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No, you got that backwards. Cairo as a drawing library provides features that X never was designed for and it offers them in a device- and platform-independent way, if required. So given the fact that all windowing toolkits that are worth mentioning support more than just X, depending on Cairo for rendering is the perfectly sane thing to do. Otherwise you risk a broken UI because it ends up looking differently on different platforms (e.g. truncated labels, graphics not showing correctly etc.).
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Does this call for some enhancement to the X server, to support more modern operations (e.g. antialiased line, arc, etc.) so it _can_ draw those shiny shapes? Sure
That's something I'd definitely be in favour of. As a first step, I'd like to see XInput2 (or whatever today's extension for supporting complex input devices is) properly stabilised. Then I'd like to see an extension that added PDF-style vector drawing primitives. Finally, I'd like to see an X12 protocol that ditched all of the bits of X11 that no one uses and moved all of the useful extensions into the core protocol, a reimplementation of xlib / xcb generating X12 protocol commands, and a proxy that tr
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X is old and crumbling around
Yes, it does need some cleanup, but every mature piece of software does. The number of man-decades of expertise and knowledge embodied in X is staggering. You will not be able to re-create what it does in less than 15 years of vigorous development with a large team.
I am not sure about the audio/video etc support for modern devices and hardware
Standardized extensions are the way to go. Create a group, publish an RFC, create an implementation, hope for adoption. That's the democracy of open source.
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"if we're going to break the graphics stack (which moving to Wayland will do anyway), wouldn't it be better to release a new and refined X12 based around the server-client design and be done with it?"
Finally someone asked, how about an answer as I don't see a reason for X12 not coming into existence either.
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Are you kidding? VNC doesn't even run well enough on a high speed LAN.
RDP might be a worthy example to hold up and to bash X with. VNC is not.
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This is the real problem.
The perceived inefficiencies of X are less relevant on gigahertz machines where you've got much more idle CPU horsepower laying around than idle GPU power. Meanwhile, the most interesting GPU features (like vdpau/vaapi) will likely be tossed out in the bargain. Those are things not easily replicated with idle CPU cycles when compared to the main focus of Wayland.
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I agree, the "time to kill X" was in the mid 1990's when a Pentium could run OS/2 or Windows 95 with no problems but just loading an X desktop would suck all your ram and take an hour
What's wrong with X11? (Score:3)
Re:What's wrong with X11? (Score:5, Informative)
The main problem with X11 is the complete lack of frame boundaries. Applications just send a stream of drawing commands with no indication of where one frame stops and the next one begins. Consequently the server has to keep drawing stuff as it comes in, resulting in flicker. Flicker is the first thing a novice X11 programmer complains about and online forums have been filled with pleas for help with this problem for decades. The traditional solution was to render to an offscreen image and send it to the server. This requires a lot of bandwidth, so the next step is to use MIT-SHM extension to avoid this traffic. Then came XComposite extension which automatically handles double buffering. XComposite has the luxury of being able to sync to vretrace, but not knowing where the frame boundaries are it can't do it lest it cut the instruction stream in the wrong place and draw half-a-screen. In the meantime, after two decades of deliberation, the XSync extension still does not implement the ability to detect vretrace.
Wayland solves the above by moving rendering into the client, as in the render-to-image solution above, and then copying the image to the server. This can be done though shared memory as well. The rendered image on the client represents the complete frame.
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There is a pretty good description here: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html [freedesktop.org]
Pretty much all of the modern advances in Linux Graphics have been to push the performance sensitive parts of X to the kernel and the client. In current 3D apps, X does little more than the Wayland compositor does, but adds a cumbersome middle man.
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It could be nice to run a huge CPU and RAM hog on your PC at home and have just the display on your mobile.. I could see a use case in that.
VNC?
Its not a two way race, but at least a three way race.
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This makes me cackle, because this was exactly the sort of thing we were doing with DESQview/X back in the early 90s. It was an X server WITH multitasking for DOS, and of course it worked both ways, meaning you could:
- run X11 apps on a UNIX machine and interact with them from a DOS machine, or
- run DOS or even Windows apps on an x86 system and interact with them from a
UNIX system (the latter by actually serving up separate instances of Windows itself
as a DOS app)
The company I
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Problem with X11 on mobile use is, the applications don't support going to the background, they don't support the X server suddenly just disappearing, then re-appearing at a completely different address. For this reason, VNC and its ilk are much more suitable for mobile remote desktop use.
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everyone has a minimum 50 inch HD TV and a 27 inch HD computer screen
Means you can't signal importance / wealth / conspicuous consumption on a big screen. You signal by owning expensive little screens now.
Back when 50 inch TVs cost more than a used car, I couldn't afford one so I didn't care. Now that they give them away with the purchase of a bag of pork rinds at walmart, it would be uncool for me to be seen buying one. There was a momentary sweet spot a couple years ago where they were cheap, but not yet ghetto, but I missed it. So believe it or not, my "daily viewer"
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Not at all. Thanks to advances in saving screen space and window management, I am perfectly happy with a 1280x800 laptop for everyday use, development, etc. For those who insist on mobility it's nice to obsolete the giant monitor.
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Unfortunately, both the 50" TV and 27" screen are 1920x1080, both of which only have a hair more resolution than my 20.1" desktop monitor.
X allows us to use legacy programs (Score:4, Insightful)
In our office, we use the ability to run programs remotely on a regular basis. It is particularly useful for running programs that have dependencies that are no longer included in modern linux distributions.
As an example, I am a big fan of Word Perfect. I have used it to write specifications in our architectural office since maybe 1986. As some of you may recall, Word Perfect was available as a native Linux application -not a port or WINE abortion- I love this program, and would reinstall it at each upgrade, moving the required libraries from the old 2.0 kernel as needed.
Starting about Fedora Core 3, It just couldn't be installed in a way that was useful.
I solved this by installing RH9 on an old box, installed the libraries from Kernel 2.0 installed WP and have been happily running WP on this box with the display appearing on whatever computer I happen to be using ever since.
This is just one example, and maybe seems like a cranky one, but we have many other examples, such as pushing intensive computational tasks off to another computer while having the display on the desktop.
We will miss X greatly. Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?
Kurt
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Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?
Rectangles with rounded edges is my short answer. The PIM interface is the perfect interface for stupid people. Ever since the iPhone came out with its 3d looking buttons (rectangles with rounded edges) that has been the defacto preferred "standard" to chase. The tech industry, being a follow the leader industry, is chasing that preferred look and feel. Really hard stuff like network accessible interfaces are being pushed away because they are n
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I've noticed a lot of comments like yours, crying about how Linux is being "dumbed down" for the sake of "stupid people."
I am at a loss as to where this contempt for other users, who might want decent graphics for their desktop and mobile systems, comes from. Can you tell me? Why such resistance to change is channeled into hatred for others, instead of into valid arguments that might result in seeing your concerns addressed?
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If you can't figure it out then perhaps you're just one of the stupid ones.
The whole point of a general purpose computing device is that it is infinitely flexible. With that, comes a bit of complexity as overhead.
Furthermore, attempting to castrate user interfaces interferes with the whole "infinitely flexible" thing that gives computing devices their biggest value.
"Pandering to idiots" is the most common excuse given for castrating computing systems today and tend to be given by those driving the change ra
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Then do the IT thing and manage your old server with your old applications. Stop insisting that the rest of the Linux world be held back so as to service your concerns. It's not like they're going to outright eliminate your ability to use Xorg, or ban Xservers running on Wayland (which already exist, iirc.)
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Linux is not being held back by avoiding nonsense like Wayland.
That is just mindless "new must be good" simpleton sort of reasoning.
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We will miss X greatly. Why this push lately to screw up the Linux desktop, anyway?
Run X over Wayland as a client. In exactly the same way that X is supported Windows or OS X.
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Yes. That works just great for iLife or MCE.
Misleading! The point is to keep X compatibility. (Score:5, Informative)
Typical slashdot: the article distorts the truth in order to get reactions.
It was pretty clear during that presentation that the goal was to make it possible to still run X applications -- using a rootless X server -- and that this would also allow X-over-the-network use cases.
X11 is not going away, the idea is to use Wayland -and- X.
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So Wayland is more like X12, then.
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Yes but as newer, shinier applications such as KDE apps bypass X and use Wayland directly for speed, does that mean we'll see the end of network-transparent apps? I hope not (and the other posts indicate that network transparency is being worked on).
What you are describing, however is exactly how OS X supports X11. Using a rootless X server that relegates X11 apps to very much second-class status. This is okay if the new wayland API and system offers everything that X11 did as far as network transparency
Development releases a-la v4.0? No, thanks! (Score:2)
I hope that support to X will stay for much longer.
It'd be nice not to repeat the notorious story with KDE v.4.
And, yes, all this bashing with "the old v4.0" is here because our scares done by KDE board still bleed.
Successor? (Score:2)
Wayland !$ Next-Gen X Server (Score:2)
If you don't believe me, check out the damn X11 site about the Wayland Project. It's purpose is to clean up the damn X11 code base to something easier to maintain and improve, which is why everyone is beginning to work with it. Find what needs improvement and get it's performance/stability up/over what the latest version of x11 offers.
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It's a planet [wikia.com] from Star Wars of course.
Re:Isn't KDE 4.x buggy enough already? (Score:5, Funny)
The bug where KDE still is inferior to GNOME? :P
Oh, that one. I think that the Gnome 3 team is working on that bug!
Wayland and the Empire (Score:4, Funny)
The other bug, of course, was putting the future of the Linux Community in the hands of Grand Admiral Thrawn, with the Emperor's storehouse on Wayland. Have we truly chosen to go with the Empire, in the hope of developing a new clone army and ruling the known galaxy?
I thought Linux was more about being the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy, about tearing the droid's arms out of their sockets if they win but being willing to put them back together (backwards) and carry them on your back, about shooting Greedo first and stepping on Jabba's tail?
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A little bit of overkill when X support would still exist. The ongoing kwin project which makes this possible was to abstract the composting from the rest of kwin so that people could choose which compositor to use. The first example is OpenGL ES vs OpenGL 2, which currently has to be compiled separately but in 4.8 will be a runtime option.
(The story is focusing on Martin's KWin talk so I'm addressing that aspect)