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GNOME GUI Operating Systems Linux

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."
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GTK+ 3.8 Released With Support For Wayland

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  • Replace X? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Great Big Bird ( 1751616 ) on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @10:04PM (#43287945)
    "A new feature in GTK+ 3.8 is support for Wayland 1.0, the display server that will replace X on free desktops." Who said this is going to replace X on 'free desktops'? As far as I have been hearing, this is just another in a long line and because it hasn't done it yet, it is not justifiable to say it will.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by armanox ( 826486 )

      Agreed - it doesn't even do everything that X11 does. And some of us use those features.

      • But doesn't Wayland run X, too?

        • by armanox ( 826486 )

          X Server, yes. Not X Client. So for the system to listen for XDMCP requests, you'd still need to have X running all the time.

    • by jrumney ( 197329 )

      The thing about free desktops is that they are free to ignore Wayland and either stick with X, or go the Ubuntu way and do their own thing.

      • The thing about free desktops is that they are free to ignore Wayland and either stick with X, or go the Ubuntu way and do their own thing.

        Yes, free desktops are free to ignore Wayland and do their own thing. On the other hand, they are at the mercy of the distributions, such as Ubuntu, RedHat, Suse (and all the rest). Ubuntu is dropping X and not using Wayland and going with their own in house Mir, so those free desktops, if they want to run on Ubuntu will need to work with Mir. If Redhat goes with Wayland, as it appears it will be doing, then those free desktops will need to work with Wayland.

        Or, they can go the Gnome route in which the de

        • Ubuntu is executing Embrace-Extend-Extinguish, hoping that people will tolerate Unity and they can nuke Gnome-Shell by having it not work with Mir, thus making it inconvenient and hacky and crappy on Ubuntu. I moved to OpenSuSE to get away from this Ballmerization.
        • Of the free desktops, currently, only KDE and GNOME have endorsed Wayland. Qt5 and now GTK 3.8 will support Wayland, and so it will be up to DEs that use them, such as LXDE or XFCE or Razor-qt to support them or not. They can stay w/ X11 if they like - nobody is forcing them.

          The people who need the remote accessing capabilities of X - mainly those who work w/ servers and who use their X terminals to access different servers remotely - those would usually be the people who need the terminals more than an

    • Re:Replace X? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Freshly Exhumed ( 105597 ) on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @10:32PM (#43288051) Homepage

      Poor summary. Wayland allows the running of X11 applications through an X server, with work being done to support this on Intel and AMD graphics:

      http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2010-November/000292.html [freedesktop.org]

      • Wayland allows the running of X11 applications through an X server

        Windows 7 allows the running of X11 graphics through an X server, too!

        Thanks Xming and Cygwin developers!

      • Re:Replace X? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @01:22AM (#43288719)
        The thing that pisses me and probably others off however is instead the likelyhood of wayland only apps which can't be run remotely like the X ones - then we may as well be on MS Windows.
        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:4, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @01:46AM (#43288811)

          Well all that does is demonstrate your ignorance of the subject.

          There is nothing preventing wayland to be implemented with a remote renderer, and in fact one of the goals of the protocol is to allow efficient remoting (without hampering local drawing).

          Seeing as the protocol is being explicitly designed to minimise round-trips, it has potential to be significantly more efficient than remote X.

          http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Wayland-prototype-for-rendering-software-that-runs-remotely-1715463.html

          It's really pretty simple to educate yourself, which is a really good idea if you plan to rant about a subject on a public forum.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by dbIII ( 701233 )
            Dumping a framebuffer into VNC is a really crappy alternative to X, so please apologise for your insult about my "ignorance" and "educating myself".
        • by DrXym ( 126579 )
          Wayland does not preclude a network transparent transport. Despite your aversion to framebuffers, that's exactly how most X apps draw themselves these days. They're not using X primitives, they're rendering themselves into surfaces using abstract drawing APIs like cairo.

          So when you run a modern app over a network, X is just shifting chunks of bitmap around anyway. Producing something analogous for Wayland is hardly an insurmountable task, and in the meantime things like vnc exist. It's even possible that

          • by dbIII ( 701233 )
            I read it some time ago and think that losing flexability is a high price for the supposed benefit of as yet unproven performance increases. Wayland needs to move towards "better as shown by these numbers" instead of a handwaving "will obviously be better at some point than X because it sucks".

            in the meantime things like vnc exist

            It was only a very short one line post above - why didn't you read it before replying?

            • They need to use Pugh Matricies and Kepner-Tregoe Decision Analysis processes to decide what to implement first and what to never implement. Instead they'll use anecdote and personal preference.
          • by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @06:02AM (#43289839)
            VNC? What if more than one user wants to use something on the remote machine? It's the age of the "cloud" where you can get a 64 core machine for around $9k, hook it up to fast storage and let a lot of people use it for very complex tasks. What is someone want to run things on multiple machines and doesn't want to juggle half a dozen full "desktops"? Sod this MSDOS single user non-networked approach - it's 2013 FFS!
            Also that block diagram implies speed hits from the complexity and ignores that the wayland server+compositor is going to be doing a similar number of things internally as both the X server and compositor, so it doesn't prove your point and I doubt the person that drew it intended it to be used to try to prove that point.
            It's been a long time and a lot of claims - why no benchmarks for identical task yet instead of handwaving and "X sux!!11!"
            • VNC? What if more than one user wants to use something on the remote machine?

              They they start another Xvnc process.

              What is someone want to run things on multiple machines and doesn't want to juggle half a dozen full "desktops"?

              Yes, that is a real problem.

              • by DrXym ( 126579 )

                What is someone want to run things on multiple machines and doesn't want to juggle half a dozen full "desktops"?

                I wonder for how many people this scenario would even apply though, or why it should mean the experience in a Linux desktop should be hampered by X11 just to facilitate it.

                • I wonder for how many people this scenario would even apply though, or why it should mean the experience in a Linux desktop should be hampered by X11 just to facilitate it.

                  That begs the question, is the experience in a Linux desktop hampered by X11? I've so far seen no evidence that it is.

                • by dbIII ( 701233 )

                  I wonder for how many people this scenario would even apply though

                  About 50 people where I work for a start. Different servers do different tasks so application windows are vastly better than a stack of slow VNC desktops and even large images are best dealt with on a node with 32GB instead of a desktop with 4GB.

                  hampered by X11

                  In what way exactly? Wayland hasn't progressed to a working demo state yet so how is X hampering people more than what is available?

                  • by DrXym ( 126579 )
                    X11 involves a large number of context switches thanks to all the processes working to update the display. The intent of Wayland is to reduce that complexity and context switches which means the desktop will be more responsive and lightweight. I'm quite willing to accept that it will take some time for Wayland to mature sufficiently to reach optimal performance and stability, but that aside, it's obviously a smart idea to pursue. Many prominent X devs think so do, such as Keith Packard.
            • by DrXym ( 126579 )
              VNC only restricts you to one session on windows. On Linux you can have one XVnc session per person if you liked. Or if the remote machine has X, then run a rootless X11 server over Wayland and run apps like you always have (just because your machine is Wayland doesn't mean the machine hosting the executable does). There'll probably be a vnc server running over Wayland too at some point, as well as a proper network protocol for Wayland.

              Most of the objections raised about network transparency seem pretty s

              • by dbIII ( 701233 )
                So that is somehow supposed to be better than the seamless high performance behaviour of application windows as distinct from a stack of slow scraped bitmaps?

                Most of the objections raised about network transparency seem pretty silly IMO. Network transparent apps are a niche feature even in Linux

                It appears we've hit the problem of the person who is dismissing X out of hand does not actually understand why people use it, which I suppose it why your suggestions have failed to address the questions.
                Until Waylan

                • by DrXym ( 126579 )

                  It appears we've hit the problem of the person who is dismissing X out of hand does not actually understand why people use it, which I suppose it why your suggestions have failed to address the questions.

                  I'm not dismissing X out of hand. That would be a straw man. What I am saying is that it clearly impacts on the local desktop performance (and it's not hard to find comments [lwn.net] by leading X devs who state this for a fact). And most of the objections raised for switching to something more efficient concern a feature that not many people use, and even if Wayland were to become the default experience, could be achieved anyway.

                  Anyone who absolutely cannot abide the change can just use an X11 fork, or vnc / MX /

          • by Hatta ( 162192 )

            There is also a very good explanation on the wayland site as to why X is so awful for performance

            I don't see any benchmarks demonstrating how X is so awful for performance. The games I play perform similarly to their counterparts on Windows. Videos play smoothly. Window management is extremely responsive.

            Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The Wayland folks haven't even demonstrated that there is a performance problem. And they expect us to abandon well loved features, for what? A flow cha

          • by Hatta ( 162192 )

            Wayland does not preclude a network transparent transport.

            Wayland does not guarantee a network transparent transport. X11 does guarantee a network transparent transport. See the difference?

            • Wayland does not guarantee a network transparent transport.

              However, users' demands will guarantee that distributions make such a transport available through a command analogous to sudo apt-get install wayland-network-transparent-transport.

              • by Hatta ( 162192 )

                As long it's installed by default, everywhere, and usable without elevated permissions, and as easily invoked as 'ssh -X remoteapp', I'll be happy. But given how the Wayland developers have taken the issue, I'm not holding my breath.

        • The thing that pisses me and probably others off however is instead the likelyhood of wayland only apps which can't be run remotely like the X ones - then we may as well be on MS Windows.
          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?

          Would your Kindle allow you to run remote X sessions? You can't say the problem with Wayland is that you can't run remote X sessions and then use the Kindle a support for X as it doesn't let you run remote X session, either.

          • Would your Kindle allow you to run remote X sessions?

            That depends on whether or not Amazon left a feature essential to the X server for Android [google.com] out of the Kindle Fire. Did it?

            • by dbIII ( 701233 )
              I meant the e-ink versions that run X and the "awesome" window manager (http://awesome.naquadah.org/) - pity the Kindle platform is so closed that it had to be reverse engineered before anyone could use it to put remote windows on.
              Such a lean X window manager also demonstrates a likely design flaw with wayland being stuck with the window management that is built in and no option to replace it with different window managers for different roles. Making a one size fits all system that can be tweaked to fit di
    • Isn't Wayland aimed for the mobile market as a light-weight replacement for X? So on Desktops, where you want to support many graphics devices and features like X-Forwarding, you will want to stick with X (unless you already follow a cross-device distro using e.g. Unity).

      • Actually Wayland is just a fix to a non-issue. There was a perceived issue quite some time ago, but that was fixed. Wayland is little more than a "Going out of Business" sign on a furniture store. There must be good deals in there!!! Wayland is not X and I've heard that this thing I use daily that works near perfectly is horrible so Wayland must be good.

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Not light-weight in that respect, the main difference is it doesn't draw anything. Each application has to render its own window complete with decorations, then tell Wayland where to find it. The only thing Wayland does is to combine them, like if you have overlapping windows, transparency, transitions or 3D effects. So it should be able to handle multiple graphics devices, multiple monitors and all that locally. What it doesn't have is any forwarding, since shared buffers are inherently local and it has no

        • Not light-weight in that respect, the main difference is it doesn't draw anything. Each application has to render its own window complete with ***decorations***,

          And it's a really fucking stupid idea (tm).

          Actually it's not even a Wayland idea per-se. There is no reason -at all- that client side decorations need to be done by Wayland: it's entirely possible to get the compositor to draw them.

          For some reason, however the Wayland developers policy is client decorations. It seems that they've been so blinded by

          • by Kjella ( 173770 )

            Actually it's not even a Wayland idea per-se. There is no reason -at all- that client side decorations need to be done by Wayland: it's entirely possible to get the compositor to draw them. For some reason, however the Wayland developers policy is client decorations.

            Right now I'm browsing in Chrome on Win7, where the top window bar is full of tabs so where do the client decorations start and end? One of the main complaints I hear about CSD is that a frozen application will also freeze the windows, but you have a compositor - you can have a key combo show a pop-up menu to minimize/move the window or kill the application etc. - your options are very static if it's not responding. The other big one is consistency, but I'm not sure if you're better off just having Gtk+/Qt

            • where the top window bar is full of tabs so where do the client decorations start and end?

              I know that feature: I installed Crom(ium) on Linux and the first thing I did was switch it off. ewww. Horrible.

              Anyway, to your points: yes you can. I still think that by default it's best to have server side decorations and have the client specially request undecorated windows.

              The other reason for it is that it's much easier to enforce policies on top of applications if they assert less control.

              For example, some misbe

    • by dbIII ( 701233 )
      Y do you think so :)
    • by Hatta ( 162192 )

      And those of us who actually use X hope that Wayland never comes close to replacing X, because it's not going to be as featureful.

  • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @10:14PM (#43287979)
    when you pry it from my cold, dead, fingers!
    • You can replace my ex when you pry me from her cold, dead fingers!
  • by Osgeld ( 1900440 ) on Tuesday March 26, 2013 @10:48PM (#43288129)

    the display server that will replace X on free desktops!

    yea I know it takes some time to get stuff right, but call me when this thing gets out of duke nukem forever mode k

    thanks

  • sigh (Score:4, Informative)

    by smash ( 1351 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @12:14AM (#43288467) Homepage Journal
    Yet more "waaah, they're taking my X remoting!" crap. Wayland will enable an X server to run on top of it just like Windows does, just like OS X does - whilst enabling a far more efficient and modern rendering pipeline.
    • Re:sigh (Score:4, Interesting)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @04:11AM (#43289343) Journal

      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.

    • by Hatta ( 162192 )

      Wayland will enable an X server to run on top of it

      And what of native Wayland apps? Will remoting an arbitrary Wayland app be as easy as 'ssh -X waylandapp'? Will that work for all Wayland apps?

      • Will that work for all Wayland apps?/em.

        Theoretically you could do the following:

        Run a wayland compositor. Connect an X server to the compositor.

        Now write a new compositor which uses X as the back end. Then connect any wayland apps to the new compositor.

        That way you get to treat Wayland programs as X programs, and will get remoting and other things, except basically dumb pixel scraping remoting. And even more layers of fun.

        Easier to stick with X, really.

  • How many more years to we have to wait for a Win32 port of GTK+3? There are several projects which only have old versions ported to Windows because their newer builds target GTK+3 and that's not available yet.

  • Criminal... got a feeling that they will search for keywords and pass it along various sub agencies or group, each responsible to figure out if it's a lead within their roles.
  • Do you think that Wayland or Mir could add speed and smoothness to the Linux 3D-accelerated desktop? Because that's the feature I'm anticipating the most. When you turn on a little bit of effects there's always that slight jerky feeling you start getting. And it eats the performance too much. There's little delays in things happening, or some animation might pause for a little while. The icing of the cake, the fine responsivity of Win/Mac is currently not there with Linux.

Ummm, well, OK. The network's the network, the computer's the computer. Sorry for the confusion. -- Sun Microsystems

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