Wayland 1.2.0 Released With Weston 122
An anonymous reader writes "Wayland 1.2 & Weston 1.2 have been released. Features of this quarterly update to the X.Org/Mir display competitor is support for color management, a new input method framework, a Raspberry Pi renderer/back-end, HiDPI output scaling, multi-seat improvements, and various other changes for this next-generation Linux desktop display protocol and compositor."
Wrong Summary (Score:2, Informative)
Wayland ist not a Xorg/Mir competitor, as mir is not affiliated in any way with xorg. Wayland is the planned successor of Xorg, while Mir is some Ubuntu project.
The Real Story Behind Wayland and X.org (Score:2, Informative)
Daniel Stone made a great presentation explaining various problems with X11 that Wayland tries to fix:
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_real_story_behind_Wayland_and_X.ogv [linux.org.au]
The same presentation is also on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 [youtube.com]
Re:any decent tiling WMs? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes and no.
Weston is only a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor.
Wayland developers don't expect it actually to be used by normal users.
Instead, they expect others to implement their own Wayland compositors, as it should not be any harder than writing a similar X Window Manager.
That is what the Gnome, KDE and Enlightmenment people plan to do, convert their current X compositors (gnome shell, kwin, e) into Wayland compositors.
So, eventually, you might get a dwm Wayland equivalent. But it doesn't exist yet.
Re:Benchmarks please (Score:2, Informative)
Will those "X sux and wayland is the answer" put up some numbers (they don't even have to good ones just something to show future promise) or shut up?
Sometimes when you're fiddling with context menus too much, you manage to lock up the X server completely -- all you can do is move the mouse pointer, which at this point mostly points north-east or has turned into a cross.
Whenever an X client is somehow busy, does something bad or hogs up resources, the whole server freezes, sometimes periodically for half a second every two seconds or so. You can see it e.g. during graphically intensive redraws, or when Chrome loads several tabs simultaneously -- all the animations in the tab headers stop periodically, and the mouse pointer freezes at the same times. When I opened a few Chrome tabs too many lately, the load skyrocketed up to about 60, and the machine was inoperable for 10 minutes, before calmed down again, on its own. This has happened more than once too. These may in part be implementation issues (Xorg being single-threaded and all), and I don't know how well Wayland does in those kinds of situations, all I know is that the OSX display server fares much better. Individual clients may freeze, but the compositor always works, the mouse pointer never freezes, and you never see half-drawn frames or other random artifacts.
Re:Remoteability question restated (Score:3, Informative)
Wayland is going to be implementing some like RDP to handle this. Wayland natively does not handle this. So if your question is in terms of "Wayland as it is likely to exist" then likely you will be able to do it. If your question is "Wayland by itself with none of the supporting ecosystem" no. On the other hand normal screen sharing stuff like VNC would work.
What prevents it from being done is that Wayland applications share their graphical and application buffer. You can't pull it apart without virtualizing the entire screen like VNC.
Re:The Real Story Behind Wayland and X.org (Score:4, Informative)
What I did manage to grasp from his talk is that the basic X design which he claims is terrible has remained for the most part while their fantastic new designs for things like XInput keep getting obsoleted one after the other. That he does not like the fact that X11 has a lot of extensions so his answer is to rewrite it. What will eventually happen if he ever has success is Wayland will get a lot of cruft as well.
I also noticed he gave no demos of Wayland at all. He isn't even eating his own dogfood. At least the original X designers actually created it to solve a problem they had and they actually used it.
His model of doing everything using pixmaps is also probably going to be a problem if displays keep going to higher resolutions as is happening recently. In that case you may spend a lot less bandwidth sending draw calls rather than the pixmaps.
I also disagree about the claim that VNC is good enough.