GTK+ 3.8 Released With Support For Wayland 193
kthreadd writes "Version 3.8 of the GTK+ GUI framework has been released. A new feature in GTK+ 3.8 is support for Wayland 1.0, the display server that will replace X on free desktops. Among the other new features are improved support for theming, fixes to geometry management and improved accessibility. There is also better support for touch, as part of an ongoing effort in making GTK+ touch-aware."
Re:sigh (Score:0, Interesting)
I don't want X like Windows or OS X. That sucks. That also breaks forward compatibility with new applications. I want X like Unix. If Ubuntu switches to Mir and Fedora to Wayland I will switch to a Linux distribution which does not suck. Also, the claim that Wayland enables a far more efficient rendering pipeline is just bullshit. Everyhing Wayland can do could be done equalliy well within X (as they fully admit in their FAQ), which was a really well designed protocol. You know: extendable.
Re:sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Replace X? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have one fixed software licence for an occasionally used application in an office and it works with X you can just run it on the display of whoever wants it, but if you have the 1980s idea of a dumb local framebuffer you have to reserve a machine for that application and do hotseating. It's stepping back to the single user non-networked idea that was worn out before MSDOS was badly cloned as a cut down single user version of CP/M.
As for X bloat, it runs on Kindles FFS so that should show how stupid the bloat claim is. Would Wayland with gtk perform acceptably on something like a Kindle?
Re:Replace X? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Replace X? (Score:2, Interesting)
The people who have been working on breaking X, you mean?
Back in XFree 4.0, we got support for DDC, aka "plug and play monitor". This is a protocol that allows the monitor to inform the computer about things like size and resolution, from which we get the DPI of the monitor, which is important to make things like fonts have the correct size on high DPI screens.
Around Xserver 1.7 (which is according to the new numbering system that was introduced after Xorg 7.0, they decided to do like XP, and just pretend all monitors are 96 DPI.
Shortly after that, Windows 7 (or Vista?) got support for reading the DPI from the monitor, like X.org used to be able to, and now we start seeing monitors in the 200 DPI area. Pretending a 200 DPI screen is 96 DPI will render everything at half size. Mostly unreadable without a magnifying glass. Meanwhile, Windows will render correctly on a 200 DPI screen, and X used to do so.
It is still possible to force the size in Xorg.conf, (after we thought we'd gotten rid of that file), and for a desktop PC that always has the same monitor, this works fine. But on a laptop, people will often have a big screen on their desk, and use the smaller screen on the go. That worked fine with DDC, back when only rich people had laptops, but when you force the size in Xorg.conf, you either need to buy a monitor with the same DPI as the laptop (try calculating the number of pixels on a 24 inch monitor at the DPI used in the Chromebook), or you'll be editing Xorg.conf every time.
Patches have been posted for reenabling DDC, even as an option, but the X.org developers refuse to merge these patches. Apparently they want to force us all to buy 96dpi monitors, or switch to Windows.
Those important X.org developers? I'm sure they'll do less damage to X by leaving for Wayland.
Re:sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh jeez more of the "oh but you can run X on Wayland" crap.
sure, you can eat a shit sandwich too, but it won't be very palatable.
Wayland will enable an X server to run on top of it just like Windows does, just like OS X does
Yeah, and we al know how well that works...
It's terrible. X is very much second class. Here are all the things that don't work:
* Copy/paste of more than text between X and non X
* Remoting of non X windows
* Drag and drop from X to non X
* Pleasant window management of non X windows
whilst enabling a far more efficient and modern rendering pipeline.
Evidence needed, and biased FUD from the Wayland team doesn't cut it.
X has supported direct i.e. nothing in the way rendering for ages now and that is very efficient.
Compositing window managers require a whole extra 2 socket round trips to the kernel *PER MOUSE MOVE*. Given that the kernel has a latency of positively micrseconds this is clearly a big blow for X /sarcasm.