Wayland 1.5 Released 179
An anonymous reader writes "Wayland 1.5 has been released, along with Weston Compositor 1.5. Wayland/Weston 1.5 carry many new user features, with a new libinput back-end, XWayland support, a full-screen shell, and many other changes. This release is particularly important as Fedora 21 will run on GNOME Wayland and X.Org Server 1.16 will be released this summer with integrated XWayland support."
I hate FPs like this. (Score:1, Insightful)
I use Linux. I've rolled my own kernels (as in actually writing code, not just a custom config and build of the stock tree). And I have never heard of Wayland or Weston. And out of three links, could you have included one going to "what the hell is Wayland"? No. You have a release announcement and a PR page.
Wayland may well rock the world. But when writing up an FP about something obscure (yes, it is - I don't care how many of your friends run it), you would do well to link to an intro-to-obscure-thing page.
Just sayin'.
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way? (Score:2, Insightful)
>> As long as I can still run X atop Wayland, I don't really care.
If I can't get the applications I want as X apps anymore because everything has moved to Wayland but Wayland still doesn't support remote display then I will care deeply.
Re:Wayland is nothing until (Score:5, Insightful)
Oddly enough X gets along fine with crap remote display support.
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's highly likely that Wayland's remote display will beat X. Virtually none of the features (remote drawing) that X provided over the network are used today (line/polygon drawing) and tool kits like Qt/GTK+ have you shipping framebuffers across the network, something built around manipulating frame buffers should be able to stream them over the network, individually, to a compositor on your system.
Re:Wayland is nothing until (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wayland is nothing until (Score:5, Insightful)
Have fun watching YouTube in Lynx.
I personally make a distinction between "using" and "administering" a machine, and as a user, I tend to run X11 (these days often with a tiling window manager). When I want to perform some administrative tasks, I'll often just run a terminal emulator within that environment. Face it, while great for many things, the command line--especially in its raw, no-X11 form, is pretty limited in many areas from the point of view of a typical user.
Don't get me wrong though; I'll often use wget instead of Firefox to download files, do basic file system operations in a terminal, even play an occasional podcast in mplayer. But really, it is not optimal to use the CLI 100% for everyday use for semi-normal people.
Re:Wayland is nothing until (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way? (Score:3, Insightful)
And Wayland remote display is going to happen when, exactly? Is it on the roadmap? I'm asking seriously -- if there is a roadmap, point me to it, I don't follow Wayland devopment outside of the occasional rant-fests on Slashdot like we are having now.
There are certain environments where remote display is the *only* display, so if Wayland doesn't have it, Wayland doesn't go into those environments.
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, why are you using a GUI in such a situation?
Robots don't have displays. It's really difficult to get your work done if your monitor keeps skittering away across the lab. Visualization tools for various pieces of robot state are much better than text dumps -- not surprisingly. Display across the WiFi network is a requirement. Also, all the generic basic tools need to run in a headless environment.
But robots aren't the only embedded environment where Linux is popular. Again, with those it is nice to be able to display to a large monitor for development work, even though the device might have a small display of it's own.
Second, X11 is not going away immediately, and no one expects it to. Qt and GTK+ will remain compatible with X11 for some time to come precisely because of this. And you'll still be able to access those remote X applications via XWayland.
And that is what we will no doubt do when the time comes.
Re:I hate FPs like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is not "news for the Linux world," and even if it was, not everyone in "Linux world" is so deeply involved as to keep up to date on every developing piece of software.
All a summary writer has to do is drop in a brief, casual couple of words about what (roughly) it is, and those who need informing are slightly better informed, while those who are already informed don't notice and aren't offended.
Ever notice how the BBC will often refer to "US President Barack Obama," or drop in a reference to the team a famous footballer player plays for, even though one would think those would both be widely known facts among the readership of such articles? Chances are, you didn't notice and didn't care.
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way? (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is asking for feature refunds. They are simply bitching about users who demand every piece of software be 100% feature complete the moment it's first alpha team is announced and then continue to spew crap about it long through the development process.
Yes Firefox has abandoned geeks in favour of more simple users, well guess what there are many other packages out there that de-crappify the interface. Funnily enough that is EXACTLY the stance Wayland developers have taken from the very start. Design a flexible light weight modern protocol that does away with X's cruft and offloads stuff to the client. The users demand remote. Well if it matters that much to that many then the compositor can be written to support that. That is the flexibility that is missing from X.
The attitude was fine early on, but seeing every other bloody post on slashdot spewing the same crap, even after the Wayland team have announced remote desktop is possible, and even after the Wayland team have demonstrated code that does that, what do you think the answer is going to be?
Re:Again?At least it's better than Mir (Score:0, Insightful)
And like it or not, X DOES need to be replaced. ASAP. Technical users who need all it's (hacked in) functions can stick to X, but the general public just needs a smoother, faster, less buggy solution.
Replacing X with Wayland will solve very few real problems, and it will almost certainly create some (remember the pulseaudio and systemd hype before they were actually forced on users by all major distributions ?). Wayland cannot possibly solve problems like these listed below, simply because they are not in X:
- poorly written, buggy, slow, and outdated (in terms of API version compatibility) OpenGL drivers - that is, basically everything other than the Nvidia proprietary driver
- bloated, slow, and buggy - but unfortunately widely used - GUI toolkits
- bloated, slow, and buggy applications
- desktop environments and window managers with the same flaws as above
User-unfriendly configuration and bad (or non-existent) documentation will likely also continue to be issues, as they tend to be with open source software, since they are a low priority for programmers who mainly code for themselves, rather than as a real job. To summarize, games will continue to perform notably worse than on WIndows/Direct3D, KDE and GNOME will still suck in all their usual ways, major Linux desktop applications will still continue to be inferior to their Windows counterparts, and users will still end up having to hack configuration files when things (not uncommonly) go wrong. There will just be some additional PITA related to migrating from one windowing system that works to another.
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've had to remote Firefox too,
You're doing it wrong! Just set up an ssh tunnel and tell firefox to use it as sock proxy. This works seamlessly
Re:Will it really go the pulseaudio way? (Score:1, Insightful)
I suspect it's because he'll want to access it from many devices, not tied down to a box with said visualisation tool.
I do this with my raspberrypi I can run an x application on the pi and have it all drawn to my laptop desktop n900 without having to start x on the pi itself. This is why it is X is so good.
ie login to pi from any where with X running using ssh, interact with it graphically by running the program on the pi with graphical output drawn on my local display, if I keep the output simple (ie not opengl ) I can do this across continents. vlc and framebuffer solutions etc struggle because they are trying to do to much...
Note the advantage to this is not having to fetch a particular app for the machine I am using.
It's similar to running a small web server on an embedded device where the remote accesses through a browser.
(Heck I have seen pic 16-bit microcontrollers with a firmware ethernet in them which can interact with a web browser).
This works graphically and at the same time uses relatively few resources (ie just a small program accessing a library). The heavy lifting is done by the machine with the remote display.
Re:Has it got network transparency? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not. People heard the fancy term "transparency" and went oooooooh I'll use that without realising that network transparency does not mean the ability to display an app on a remote desktop. The same people also think that the very specific term "network transparency" which has a very specific meaning still applies. It doesn't. Most Linux desktops have lacked network transparency since the mid 90s in favour of nasty fallback hacks and rendering in different ways depending on the target server.
Modern X11 over the network is nothing more than a slower implementation of something like VNC except it doesn't support even basic things like compression. It is one of the worst performing remote desktop solutions there is.