GNOME Aiming For Full Wayland Support by Spring 2014 300
An anonymous reader writes "Canonical's plan to develop the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu rather than going with their original plans to adopt Wayland has been met with criticism from KDE (and other) developers... The GNOME response to Ubuntu's Mir is that they will now be rushing support for the GNOME desktop on Wayland. Over the next two release cycles they plan to iron out the Wayland support for the GNOME Shell, the GTK+ toolkit, and all GNOME packages so that by this time next year you can be running GNOME entirely on Wayland while still having X11 fall-back support."
One More Reason (Score:2, Interesting)
One more reason to abandon GNOME as it moves further from its UNIX roots. It's become a culture based on negativity and we-know-better-than-you.
Re:It's ironic... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, yes X11 does work very well for many of us. I agree with the GP's sentiment. Being able to remote individual applications (a rendering mode without 3d-acceleration) is definitely a must if you want to replace X11. There are many of us who use Linux professionally that use X11-over-ssh to run applications every single day. I don't care so much about the X protocol as I do being able to remote the apps. Remoting an entire desktop isn't that useful to me.
I still can't remote individual apps on Windows without resorting to hacks with rdp, or buying into Citrix. That seems so strange in a networked world where people remote apps all the time in their browsers, in a manner of speaking.
Re:It's ironic... (Score:4, Interesting)
You could be doing those things over wayland.
No you can't. This is one of the #1 pieces of FUD about Wayland.
I can run X11 over Windows or OS X. I assume exactly the same will be possible over Wayland.
So, how do I get an OSX app up on my Linux box over here using X11?
Hint: I can't.
If Wayland replaces X on the Linux desktop, then functionality is lost.
there is no reason the surface can't be coming from over the network from somewhere else.
We have VNC already to show us how much that sucks.
Re:It's ironic... (Score:4, Interesting)
Something that's always been bugging me... why is RDP so much better (no, not flamebait, RDP has been buttery smooth even over ATT 1.5 Mbps "broadband")? And been that way for years, better than the lightweight VNCs, remote Xs, and the latest X2gos.
Is there a fundamental difference in how RDP does it vs X?
BTW, I'm talking the RDP clients that come with Windows, not the $$ Citrix ones.
bigger picture (Score:3, Interesting)
Here we have an identity crisis within the linux community, and I find it distressing how few people see the underlying opportunity. The decision between X and wayland/mir depends on what you think linux is. Is it an industrial-strength swiss army OS used by the technically inclined, or is it the platform upon which the tablet renaissance is being built? Of course it's both, so quit with the civil war and pay attention to what's happening in computing.
If general purpose computing is going to survive Apple, Microsoft and Google, we need a rich, high-performance compositor that can run on embedded devices AND a next generation framework for network transparency in applications, preferably in separate packages. Since I'm being dragged into cloud computing, I want to become my own cloud: I want to blur the line between my laptop, server, desktop, and tablet, but I want to do it in an open-source, platform agnostic way. I want to leave my CAD software running on my desktop and connect to it from my tablet to get dimensions for some part. I want automatic syncing ala dropbox for my LAN. I want to stream audio and video to my stereo without using airplay. I want generic compute jobs to be distributed to idle computers on my personal network. I want to lease an EC2 instance just for the week that I have to do some high-quality rendering and have my desktop parcel the job up and send it out to be executed with a minimum of manual plumbing.
In other words, I want network abstraction for input and display, a toolkit to aid with responsive UI design, local openGL compositing, a framework for exporting big, blind compute jobs, and some network utilities to help me get my services configured correctly, and I want them to be designed to work well together. Some of this is Hard but all of these technologies already exist in some form, they just haven't been integrated into a single open-source platform. Usable by consumers. Yet.
The open source community has the opportunity to stake a claim while the world of computing has been turned on its head. Fretting about X11-style network transparency at this point is like sweating over the future of IRC. (Hint: all my chatroom correspondence is now owned by some shitty company overvalued at $27 a share). When all new software is designed to run on top of webkit, will your remote GIMP even matter?