Gnome 3.12 Delayed To Sync With Wayland Release

sfcrazy writes "Gnome developers are planning to delay the release of Gnome 3.12 by approximately a week. It's a deliberate delay to sync the release with the availability of Wayland 1.5. Matthias Clasen (Fedora and Gnome developer) explains that 'the GNOME release team is pondering moving the date for 3.12.0 out by approximately a week, to align the schedule with the Wayland release plans (a 1.4.91 release including all the xdg-shell API we need is planned for April 1). The latter 3.11.x milestones would be shifted as well, to avoid lengthening the freeze period unnecessarily.'"

I'm sorry I'm an idiot

[Vanderhoth]

I've read through the Wayland site and another half dozen pages that are obviously over my head and I just don't understand what Wayland is or what it's advantages are. I think it's suppose to be replacing X11, but I don't really understand X11 either, other than it's a method of getting things onto the screen. So I'm throwing my ignorance out there hoping I won't be flamed out of existence and someone can explain or point me to a laymen description of Wayland, and/or X11 and how one is better than the other. It seems like it should be a big deal since I've read there's been a lot of dissatisfaction with X11 for quite sometime and yet no one's ever done anything about it. That is until now, if Wayland is in fact a replacement

I'm sorry I realize this has been discussed several times and I'm sorry I'm just not getting it.

Re:I'm sorry I'm an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion...

Wayland + Systemd + Gnome 3 + kernelspace Dbus = transforming Linux into Windows. Or something more like Windows. They represent a complete rejection of the foundational Unix philosophy [wikipedia.org].

Basically the people behind it want to create a system that is not Unixlike, but they don't want to be bothered with attracting developers who are interested in that as an honestly stated goal and they don't want to be bothered with other "from the ground up" tasks like carefully designing such a system from scratch. So instead they are playing politics and co-opting the existing developer pool GNU/Linux has earned to transform it into something it is not and was never intended to be, one bolted-on feature at a time.

Even if they wind up making a fantastic system, I strongly object to their methods. I'm not sure if these methods could really lead to a great system. Maybe they can, but I doubt it.

Re:I'm sorry I'm an idiot

[timeOday]

What's funny is that the worst part of X11 is how badly it does exactly what it was designed to do - remote display - because it is so slow if the network has any latency (too many synchronous calls). You certainly can't imagine something from 25(?) years ago bombing today because its RAM or CPU or bandwidth requirements are too high. Clearly, latency is not riding that curve, and must instead be designed around.

Re:I'm sorry I'm an idiot

[buchner.johannes]

In my opinion...
Wayland + Systemd + Gnome 3 + kernelspace Dbus = transforming Linux into Windows. Or something more like Windows. They represent a complete rejection of the foundational Unix philosophy [wikipedia.org].

Regarding Wayland: You clearly have no idea how X works today. Todays X is not like Unix should be at all.
Regarding Dbus: How is a dbus protocol different from semaphores and shm in the kernel?
Regarding systemd, I agree and see it critically, because it is tries to solve everything at the same time. Perhaps the direction of OpenRC is more appropriate. But to criticise systemd you have to understand the issues: A number of links are on http://freedesktop.org/wiki/So... [freedesktop.org] including http://0pointer.de/blog/projec... [0pointer.de]
Regarding Gnome3: Gnome3 is conceptionally little different than Gnome2, KDE or XFCE: Windows and pointers. I actually really like it. If you don't exchange it for something else. Very Unixy.

We have to keep in mind that the system we have today are not mainframes that are booted once and have their daemons running for months.
We have plug-and-play of devices and screens, hibernation, multiple input devices, while at the same time the screen output must not flicker or have delays beyond 50ms. It's a different arena today.

On Wayland..

[Junta]

Like many people, my chief concern over Wayland is 'network transparency. Unlike some others, I'm willing to believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Specifically, with X based systems, X remoting is no longer the way I use X remotely, I use xpra as it delivers me a better experience. Unlike something like NX, Xpra does not try to extend or enhance X based protocols, but instead gets content by setting itself as the compositor, knowing things like window relationships to each other and being able to do things like recognizing a tray icon for what it is.

My question is if the same sort of thing would be possible with Wayland today and if people are doing it.

I am entirely amateur hour at this and may have mischaracterized, but I'm willing to hold out hope that the one major fundamental downside of Wayland could be overcome in the same way that Xpra makes X better.

Re:I'm sorry I'm an idiot

[Kjella]

X11 used to be a *lot* of things, but long story short it's now mostly a go-between your applications (that render themselves), the compositor (which put the windows together to a screen) and the framebuffer (where you put the screen to make it show on your monitor). And the parts that aren't totally gone, is provided by klugded-on extensions to avoid breaking the core protocol. Wayland basically drops all legacy functionality and backwards-compatibility and consolidates modern X into a new protocol, last I checked in less than 10% of the code and those parts work much simpler and faster.

Now X has network transparancy and Wayland does not, but not the way it's currently used. It's like saying HTML is network transparent but the way most people use it is like this: <html><body><img src="here_is_the_real_content.png"></body></html>. The other big question has been client or server side decorations, who draws the window frames/titles/buttons. The default implementation (Weston) leaves it to the client, but the protocol lets the server do it and KWin does. It's better because a frozen client doesn't stop them from rendering, but at the cost of pulling some form of drawing toolkit into the display server.

Re:On Wayland..

[Billly Gates]

X11 is remote by default whether you like it or not.

To get an app to work on X you need a server and client component and it emulates running on a freaking network with high latency. Does that sound like a great architecture to you? Great for dumb terminals and smart terminals in which the system was made for in the 1980s.

Gnome hides this by default but under the scenes just to get opengl to work it uses hacks with DRM opengl in the server and it tries not to talk to X for the actual view. So in essence X sees a black box and a hack shows you the code. That is just one horrible work around that X does. It is not adequate and there is nothing to fear with change.

There is a reason Android does not use X.

Re:I'm sorry I'm an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

X11 doesn't even do anything anymore. Go watch one of the many presentations made by the many developers who have been working on X11 for over 20 years. They're not even sure what X11 does anymore, nearly everything bypasses it and just pushes around buffers, which X11 does not handle well at all.

The one thing that stood out is they said X11 can not implement vsync at all without breaking all compatibility. They are embarrassed that code is still being used in 2014 that does not handle vsync and gives "screen tearing", which other systems have had fixed since the mid 90s.

99% of the current use cases for X11 are now managing buffers and X11 does not manage buffers. Wayland is designed to handle the most common use case in a good way.