X.Org Server 1.15 Brings DRI3, Lacks XWayland Support 340
An anonymous reader writes "A belated holiday gift for Linux users is the X.Org Server 1.15 'Egg Nog' release. X.Org Server 1.15 presents new features including DRI3 — a big update to their rendering model — a rewrite of the GLX windowing system code, support for Mesa Mega Drivers, and many bug fixes plus polishing. The release, though, goes without any mainline support for XWayland to ease the adoption of the Wayland Display Server while maintaining legacy X11 application support."
Good! (Score:4, Funny)
Yet another good reason to disparage Wayland: Not even X supports it.
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It could also be argued that you should jump to Wayland because X does not support it.
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No. *I* don't support Wayland.
That X also does not support Wayland is just win-win.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Interesting)
No. I just like network-transparent applications. It was one of the main draws that I had toward Linux almost 20 years ago, and is why I still use it today.
(My home Linux boxen are all headless, and they can stay that way for all I care. If I want to run something graphical, it's trivial with X.)
(And no: VNC is more of a problem than it is a solution.)
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wayland!
The same group of Prople behind
Gnome3
Pulseaudio
Systemd
Journald
Alienating Udev
Alienating 95% of their Userbase
If you all have so much problems with the ideology of Unix then why do you use a Unix based System. Why don't you move on and create your shabby world elsewhere ? Without causing more damage to ours ?
Re: Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what you are doing is migrating one of Windows primary shortcomings into Linux.
Wow, the idiot is strong in this one. (Score:5, Insightful)
When something running under Wine runs faster with that translation than it does under windows, you cannot claim that the windowing system in X is slower and degrading performance of Linux compared to Windows.
It's taken as a matter of faith that this network transparency MUST be making it slow.
Merely because it is "obvious" that if something is flexible, it MUST be slower!
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Someone mod parent "+1 FUCKING INSIGHTFUL" please.
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Really I was playing portal and team fortress 2 yesterday on a linux laptop yesterday and watching netflix just fine with x. Android not using x is because they are using an entirely different stack than desktop Linux not just the display server the tool chain is different the utilities are different the only thing the same is the kernel and that has been tweaked. Hell most android apps arn't even interfacing with the unixy bit underneath just the java based vm. Androids success has nothing to do with not h
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Re: Good! (Score:5, Interesting)
I really don't understand the reason for pulseaudio in the first place, I heard that when wanting to change and modify their sound system in (was it?) freebsd? they just updated the audio driver, they didnt include some ridiculously slow, horrible to setup daemon to do it
There's a lot of history involved. OSS was originally contributed to Linux under the GPL, then to *BSD under the BSDL. It was maintained in both, but then the original author took it commercial. FreeBSD just forked the last BSDL version and kept maintaining compatibility with new versions. Linux ripped it out and replaced it with the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).
One of the drawbacks with early OSS was that you had a single /dev/dsp and so only one application could play sound at once. With ALSA, you still only had one /dev/dsp, but if your card did hardware mixing, and you rewrite your applications to use ALSA, then you could get mixing. Unfortunately, most things weren't rewritten to use ASLA and most cheap cards back then didn't do hardware mixing, so userspace sound daemons started appearing. Unfortunately, GNOME and KDE each had their own (incompatible) ones. Meanwhile, FreeBSD just implemented in-kernel sound mixing.
Over 10 years ago, this was why I switched to FreeBSD. I wanted XMMS to play music and my KDE IM client and GNOME mail client to be able to make notification bings, and maybe have a game in the foreground playing sound. This was trivial with FreeBSD, impossible with Linux. Now, it's possible with Linux, but only by requiring every single audio-playing app (or, at least, library) to be rewritten with the Linux fad-of-the-day API. This underlines the philosophical difference between FreeBSD and Linux, and is why I remain a FreeBSD user.
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Despite my best efforts, with Chrome on U
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As a Gentoo user, I call BS because I use Alsa and foget Pulse/Jack/Flavor of the Month as it does audio mixing and has for over 5 years (hell I was using Alsa and mixing inputs in 2003. Sylpheed could play its notification sound while I had music playing in the background while working on an Open Office doc in fluxbox. Didn't have to many problems once it was setup.
As someone else stated, the god damn cavemen have taken over and created all sorts of shite that isn't compatible. Simply put, smack em down ha
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That's almost, but not entirely, true. ALSA had kernel-level software mixing (dmix) that any application written to use ALSA could benefit from. As long as I used 100% ALSA applications, it worked fine. The problem was, as you say, not all applications would support ALSA. They would use OSS and rely on the bridge device between /dev/dsp and the /dev/alsa devices as a compatibility layer. The mixing would still work if you were using 1 OSS application and 10 ALSA applications, but not if you were using 2 OSS
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Why is this modded Troll? I also use X's network transparency on a daily basis, and I think it's a good point.
No you don't. You use X's ability to send bitmaps to a remote display. X hasn't been network transparent for a LONG time. The way an application is rendered locally compared to remotely is fundamentally different. There's no transparency at all anymore because the protocols used for network transparency don't work with any modern hardware acceleration. X hasn't been network transparent since DRI started getting wide spread use.
In your case you're not actually interested in network transparency at all. You'r
Re:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
No. I just like network-transparent applications. It was one of the main draws that I had toward Linux almost 20 years ago, and is why I still use it today.
(My home Linux boxen are all headless, and they can stay that way for all I care. If I want to run something graphical, it's trivial with X.)
(And no: VNC is more of a problem than it is a solution.)
Modern X(org,server.. et.el) really is not network transparent unless you are just talking about TWM mixed in with a xclock or an xterm, most modern apps and even window managers that are built on top of modern gui toolkits and/or extensions are not compatible with the basic X library which makes X network transparent. Most of what makes X tick now and days will not scale over the average network and you will be left with a lame ass system if you try. As such if you want to use your modern desktop environment over a network prepared to and plan to pull your hair out because you are relying on such outdated tech norms.
Wayland is the future and the way forwards fellow *inx junkies.
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Also give up on anti-aliased graphics!
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As a business owner using PXE to boot our smart clients (no local storage), I say "Fuck Network Transparency" it's not a consideration. What I need is a Windowing system that's 30-50 percent smaller then what X offers today due to local bandwidth needs.
We switched to the PXE setup in order for single sign-on and regulatory reasons. It simplifies things having everything within our control (no local storage means only have to backup a single system - storage server). It also means less employee downtime when
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
Running something over the network and being "network transparent" are two different things.
In the case of transparency the application should can have no knowledge of whether it is rendered locally, or remotely. It just sends draw commands and those commands end up somewhere.
Unfortunately most of the drawing commands in X do not work over the network basically meaning that X is no longer network transparent. For any which don't there's a compatibility layer where they are converted to bitmaps and sent over the network, which is not much different from the normal way a modern app renders on X, just bitmaps.
The point is X is not network transparent, and using it on the network is essentially like using VNC except without any compression. You actually have the worst of all worlds while the users somehow still think things are like they were in the 90s. Ever since DRI and similar technologies X has not been the same, and there's no reason why the move to Wayland + RDP can't be far better than what we have now and what everyone appears to be championing as a "core" feature of X without realising it doesn't actually work like that.
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I have to admit it's the main thing I like about X; I tend to use my Linux machine via Xming from Windows. That said I would like the option of having accelerated compositing et al when using a machine locally whilst still being able to use X remotely.
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Interestingly, Daniel Stone touches on Network Transparency in his presentation on: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
Basically though:
* Network transparency is pretty sketchy these days anyway because of DRI2/SHM
* Network communication on X11 actually has a lot of bottlenecks which causes it to perform very poorly.
* VNC will perform significantly better in Wayland than X11 (due to a different design). I agree that VNC on X11 is a disaster, however, there are fast VNC like protocols on other platforms that
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yeah, I agree, I'm pretty sure somebody is working out how to make wayland network transparent, somebody must be, the writing is on the wall and somebody somewhere is thinking:
"dammit! in a year, my xclock will stop working, I have to make wayland network transparent!!"
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It would be nice if both claims were the case, but sorry, we're all just going to have to wait a bit longer.
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What a nasty little weasel you are. How does "Some guy tried a year and a half ago and gave up because network transparency wasn't a high priority" mean the same as that? Go on. Justify your disgusting strawman act. If you were an example of a Wayland developer instead of a fanboy I'd expect the project to disintegrate due to infighting with that sort of bullshit.
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I don't know why there isn't more progress. I wouldn't read too much into it. They have good people. X has been a mess since the break from the old XFree86. I don't have a clue how to count who is active and how active they are. For example Sam Spilsbury (inventor of Compiz) has been active on Wayland for the last 6 months. So they have a fair impression.
If I had to guess I don't get the impression that the Wayland devs care much about getting a version out that runs for non-developers right now. They
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X11 isn't meaningfully network transparent anymore how it is used. If by "network transparent" you mean what everyone else means that it works well remotely then the solution for Wayland already sort of exists a variant of RDP.
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you're a huge fucking retard
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As much as I'd like to see GNU/Linux succeed on the desktop, my experience has been similar. How much of it is X's fault though, that I don't know. My guess is not much actually, but I'm curious if anyone knows better.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
my knowledge might go a little deeper than yours because I had an interest in computer graphics many years ago. Although I've not got a perfect understanding, I'm probably more right than wrong (or somebody here will tell me otherwise and we can both learn a thing or two).
but ultimately, the way that people write high performance graphics stacks now favours compositing and graphics cards require to do a lot of direct accesses in order to make that happen as fast as possible, you have a region of memory and it's mapped to a location somewhere in the gpu memory and you just blast it with data, you can't have too many processes in the middle here, so thats why we need a DRM (direct rendering manager) to basically give x a direct path to the graphics hardware without having to go through the cpu or the kernel etc, as little as possible anyway.
Anytime you have to context switch, you lose time, which hits performance hard, so everything is like cleared out the way and the software and hardware almost talk directly to each other, which doesn't really happen with any other software, writing files, accessing network, computing data, almost always goes through the cpu and the kernel and for graphics applications which render megabytes of data per second, this is just awful and dramatically kills the performance. The retina display on an ipad is 2560 x 1600, so at 24/32 bit colour, each complete frame is 11-15MB, imagine 60 of those? Easily 600 - 900 MB per second. All of that data is being transferred from the system to the gpu every second the display is on, so it's a huge amount of data. Of course, you can reduce this by using gpu memory buffers and "damages" to know which surfaces need to be re-rendered (i.e. rendered and transferred again cause the display information inside them changed)
However, this kind of "direct, get out of my way, let me speak to the manager" way of thinking doesn't really fit with the linux way of doing things, everything is integrated, the x protocol isn't really to blame, but the only reason for people wanting to keep x alive is because of the protocol, it is basically a way to draw pixels, lines, primatives, AND their favourite, abstract everything across a network so software can be anywhere and X will solve how to display it. EXCEPT IT DOESNT SOLVE IT!! Even when you want to network x, you have to manually setup a bunch of configuration on both machines to get it to work, it doesn't work by magic, or autoconfiguration, cause nobody cares enough to do it, evidently, cause even now you have to manually do this, 20 years later.....what a bullshit system....
Of course, then you get to the lower levels and a whole bunch of compromises come into effect, nobody agreed on even the most basic things, fonts, oh lets make a font server, which will never work properly because of all the compromises made for that and it'll only work in certain circumstances....
It really is the most bullshit, fucking stupid system ever created and people seem to be so stubbornly ignorant and stupid they refuse to kill it, cause I dunno, it's really hard to understand, you see some of the hatred for wayland from these people are you are just so flabbergasted by it, you can't even start to reason, why would you keep x alive? it's almost like it's their child, they wouldn't care if it had three arms, ate other babies and urinated acid and used it as a weapon, they STILL wouldn't kill it....or even contain it...cause it's their baby....Thats the kind of logic you're going up against if you talk to these idiots...
But it's such an ugly, nasty, knarly mess of bullshit and compromises that NO DESKTOP UI TOOLKIT USES IT, Qt, Gtk and Wx for example, pretty much just request a drawing rectangle and then do everything themselves, completely sidestepping x, but if you looked at the x protocol and especially a "unix haters" entry on the subject and know something about computers and/or programming, you'd understand why people want to kill it so badly.
Take a look at this and then try eval
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Funny thing is, everyone always complained about latency and if you look at this graph you'll see Windows actually generally has higher latency than Linux these days: http://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=1307193-SO-WINDOWSIV40&sha=869d65c&p=2 [openbenchmarking.org]
From this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_ivbmesa92_win7&num=2 [phoronix.com]
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as interesting as it is, it's not really the point.
the point is, in the 21st century, we don't need to deal with this anymore, we can do better, so lets do that, it might not have 100% of the features the old system has, but it might be possible over time to implement those features in a more sane way, with better knowledge and tools that what they had in the 80's when they built this system.
that x is so old, badly designed and hacky that it actually curtails people from using it, preferring to hide away in
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that x is so old, badly designed and hacky that it actually curtails people from using it, preferring to hide away in the toolkits and never touch x directly, just means that x is in fact irrelevant and for most people, they won't even know x is gone, cause the toolkits will just make them unaware of that.
spoken like a truly clueless person. WTG
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considering wayland hasn't even been completed yet, I would say you're comparing them prematurely, with the clean design, it'll be far easier to extend and improve the system whereas now, only a certain number of greybeards can do it without any reprocussions.
If Wayland is not finished yet, and then we can't make educated guesses about it viability, how in hell we should decide to adopt or to dump it?
This is supposed to be a engineering field. Faith is another department, I'm right?
I need metrics. I need measurements. I need benchmarks.
The (few) ones I'm geeting tells me that X.org is not he best thing over the Earth, but does its job, does it faster than GDI/Quartz, and even does more than GDI/Quartz. Why should I migrate to Wayland?
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To be honest I don't really believe in Phoronix benchmarks all that much ;-)
Re:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
Really? Lots of configuration?
Last time I ran an X11 application remotely, I used SSH with X forwarding with a simple command line. Worked great. (Flawless, I might say.)
Last time I ran a multi-headed X box (where multi-head == "two or more independent monitors+keyboards+mice, each with their own root window and window manager"), the configuration wasn't trivial, but it wasn't hard either. And once it was done, any X11 "server" could connect to this "client" and run any program over 100-mbps Ethernet. (Look, ma! A terminal server! Hot-desking! Remote access! THE CLOUD! Buzzword-bingo on the end of a 20-year-old carrot!)
And it doesn't much matter when the "last time" was, since the methods haven't changed a bit over the past decade or two.
These are things that other graphical systems cannot do. And they are the reasons why X, or perhaps X11, is still important.
Those who do not understand X, are doomed to recreate it. Badly.
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Worse than Win98? WinXP? Win8?
It's a hatred for the "X sux - wayland is so much better - only you can't use it just now" bullshit and not Wayland itself.
Here's a suggestion. Give up on the X bashing and instead push positive aspects of Wayland instead. Benchmarks would help. Every time I ask for them people call me names but there must be some sort of benchmarks showing this increased performance we
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Look - you've got your Wayland article that's been built out of something only loosely related - you have the pulpit. Use it for something other than obvious lies that only the newbies haven't worked out yet.
I'll write this again - how about something actually about Wayland instead of the boring "X sux" when those of us using X somehow have not managed to notice X sucking. For example write about something that the current build of Wayland gives us and what we can l
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Baahhh. I liked it up until
Even when you want to network x, you have to manually setup a bunch of configuration on both machines to get it to work, it doesn't work by magic, or autoconfiguration, cause nobody cares enough to do it, evidently, cause even now you have to manually do this, 20 years later.....what a bullshit system....
That's weird, because I have ElementaryOS running on my server at home, and from my workplace Mac or my home-use Ubuntu ThinkPad, I can:
ssh -X -C [host] -l [user]
and I'm good to go. Start firing up xterm, pgadmin, chrome, or anything else on the server just fine, even from work. Sure, chrome gets sluggish over that distance, but it's not really something I'd use often. Other programs though run perfectly fine and are useable considering it's a home-based cable hookup running whok
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"messing up the Linux Toolchain."
It isn't just the linux toolchain. All the other *nix have to deal with these self/linux centric fuck-ups too! So much for portable.
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"Haiku-OS
Aros"
Minix, Plan9, MSWindows/wayland's mommy, riscOS, etc, etc.
Don't forget, the younger it is, the more buggy it'll be.
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How to use remote X over ssh:
1. Do not configure the X server to refuse to forward X11 connections (i.e. it will work unless you broke it yourself).
2. Have the "xauth" command installed on both sides (it is by default, but you might be someone who broke it yourself...)
3. ssh -X user@target "libreoffce" (for example).
Done. And it will just work.
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I had Windows XP on my netbook and it was sluggish and shit and took an eternity to boot up. (K|L|X)ubuntu all perform far better on the same hardware.
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then you're using slow equipment, or you're eyes are broken in some way
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With respect, I believe you utterly miss the point. GP is right. While the desktop is animating uselessly, it is not doing anything useful. That is the definition of sluggish.
It has nothing whatever to do with "slow equipment". It has to do with waiting, however briefly, for bullshit eye candy with no purpose whatsoever. There is a class of users who perceive the time delay from clicking "open", until the window is fully opened and responsive, and who find anything that increases this delay a step backward.
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> you're obviously not a fan of high performance desktop graphics then, keep your shitty x protocol,
It's not the protocol. It's the drivers.
And I WILL keep the best available drivers thank-you-very-much.
That's why I won't touch Wayland with a 10 foot barge pole. I actually care about real performance, not just silly out of of date FUD.
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Some of us grew up on Sun BSD you insensitive clod.
sysv init scripts are a new fangled mess.
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One arbitrarily defined standard imposed by beaurocrats is just as good as another.
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Yeah and even we don't use it any more. Well, not all of it anyway.
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X is dead?
*looks around*
Gosh, it sure doesn't look like it.
[citation needed]
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It doesn't seem to me that the mental masturbation is GP's. You have anger issues with anyone who doesn't agree with the Master Plan. I understand this. These kinds of issues are not unknown to me. Basically the anger issues on both sides of the disagreement cancel out, so it can be decided on the merits. When Wayland is completely network transparent, I might be willing to consider it a viable replacement for X. Until then, sorry; no sale.
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X haters have been stuck in their little echo chamber for too long and haven't been paying attention with what's being going on with the rest of the world. Their vision of something to displace X with is about 20 years out of date.
"slowest" - not (Score:3)
And when comparing X11 vs wayland for a simple desktop: wayland loses every single benchmark [phoronix.com].
Re: "slowest" - not (Score:2)
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And when comparing X11 vs wayland for a simple desktop: wayland loses every single benchmark.
but don't you understand? It's legacy, man, LEGACY!!! And back in 1987 it made my sun 3/60 go slow and I do not forget and I do not forgive. Besides, I can't spare the 20 MHz now any more than I could then.
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" but circa 1991 the server source was a disaster; no use of ANSI function decls,"
I doubt ANSI was around all that long and C was barely standardized, especially to the older set.
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"And Keith Packard wrote the X Server and AFAIC he wrote some seriously crappy C code for that. Maybe he's gotten better with time, but circa 1991 the server source was a disaster; no use of ANSI function decls, lots of mismatched types. Making the sample server work on 64-bit litt.."
I remember those times too. Crappy code to match the 16>? hour workdays, lack of sleep, and bad eating habits. Shower? what's that? Saw more space aliens than girls/women whatever they are now. 7
Its not obvious to me that XWayland and X should (Score:3, Insightful)
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XWayland is a modified version of the X.org server, which instead of rendering though the kernel/hardware, renders as a Wayland client.
It makes no sense to try and maintain XWayland as a separate fork of the X.org server.
CAN WE STOP LINKING TO PHORONIX? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is asking too much for a link to *official* sources? (Hint: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2013-December/002384.html)
How well does XWayland work? (Score:3, Interesting)
Having seen terrible X compatibility layers for Mac OS X and Windows, I have got to ask if I should expect XWayland to be better? Integration between applications talking the X protocol and applications talking a proprietary protocol has been ranging from terrible to nonexistent. Some implementations have taken the approach of creating a window inside which all X applications are rendered. This has potential for great compatibility among the X applications, but they are demoted to second class citizens, with no chance of integrating with anything happening outside that window. Others have been rendering X applications each in a separate window. But usually they still cannot see windows opened by applications talking the proprietary protocol, and thus cannot interact with them. Secondly that design has a tendency to treat windows opened by an X application I just started as if it was just one more window opened by another X application, which was already running. For example on Windows, that causes new windows to be opened behind existing windows instead of in front.
The lack of X has been the main technical drawback Mac OS X has been having compared to Linux. I'd much rather see Mac OS X catch up with Linux than for Linux to go down to the level of Mac OS X.
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I can't even remember what trying to use X under Windows was like. $DEITY bless memory loss.
For Mac OS X, you have XQuartz. It consists of a modified X.org server and a custom window manager and from what my Mac OS X wielding colleagues say, it works pretty well. I don't think it suffers of any of the issues you mention.
XWayland is expected to work seamlessly as well.
Re:How well does XWayland work? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Having seen terrible X compatibility layers for Mac OS X and Windows
The OSX X (XQuartz) implementation _is_ xorg-server (currently 1.14.4) - you know, the one used on Linux (with certain OSX specific tweaks to allow non-root mode)
The problems you mention with interoperability are largely down to the core windowing systems being vastly different models. We can argue about which model is correct but the interoperability problems are a side effect of different models - not evidence of a particular model being bad.
I'm not convinced from your descriptions here you quite understand the complexity of the interactions.
> The lack of X has been the main technical drawback Mac OS X has been
> having compared to Linux.
> I'd much rather see Mac OS X catch up with Linux than for Linux to go down
> to the level of Mac OS X.
OSX has vsync based updates, sensible event handling and lots of core library stuff (like the AVFramework) that makes it a pleasure to program compared to XWindows.
The Linux desktop _needs_ to get off X. It's an outdated behemoth with a model that is way out of date. Now you could say "well let's update the model then".
Sure, you can do that. And when you do that, you get Wayland.
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ensible event handling and lots of core library stuff (like the AVFramework) that makes it a pleasure to program compared to XWindows.
You know none of that stuff is in wayland either?
Also what's wrong with X event handling? You can select() on the events just like any others. Also, I've touched on OSX video handling. This is not a high point of OSX. Decoding a video and getting at the pixels is far, far better under ffmpeg than OSX.
And there's a reason that machine vision people use the libdc1394 ported fro
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> You know none of that stuff is in wayland either?
Yep, I was replying to GPs assertion that OSX has to catch up to X11.
> Also what's wrong with X event handling? You can select() on the events just like any others.
Have you ever written a real X protocol application or used one? Xedit, for example. The code is a mess of anachronisms (events targeted to sub-windows - if you are using them - modern toolkits don't now, excessively verbose error handling due to the historical cruft in the protocol etc) th
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Name one standard graphics system used by more than one operating system. I only know of one, and that is X11. Everything else is people saying I don't like this particular detail about X11. Then they go and invent their own system. That way you end up with something, which is not only incompatible with everything else, it is also inferior to X11 in at least one area. Of course that
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"PROTIP: if nobody is updating your solution, but copying everybody elses, it's because they've realised your solution was bullshit and everybody is moving to the more standard, generally accepted one."
Then why is X and it's variants all over the place? You and I know that saying 'generally accepted' ignores what made it generally accepted(economics vs technical) and doesn't make it right. I said now they're copying others long after X is a structural standard. X was known to ha
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"you know, the main technical drawback to mac osx, is the lack of x...."
One main reason I have never moved to max was the limited support for X the last time I checked.
So technically you are correct because I don't use a mac due to their technical limitations.
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When was the last time you checked?
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Honestly, it has been years. The last time I checked all X apps ran in a single window on OSX. At least my Mac buddies claimed that was the best they could do. Maybe I will give it another shot?
Now is the time for more than the status quo (Score:2)
When Citrix came out with ICA that should have been an indication where remote display tech should be headed, then we have Microsoft doing RDP and now the king pin is VMware with PCoIP. What we need is a way to remote a whole computer and not just the graphics. Why?
ALL USERS want the following:
1) Remote sound
2) Remote USB
3) Video Acceleration between a client and server
Why so that simple web pages with Flash content do not suck. And so that all this crappy USB stuff that end users have purchased can work
In a country far away and long ago.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a country long ago and far away there lived the good King X the eleventh.
He had a lot of ministers, the most important of which had become the minister of Composition. His job was to have peoples houses painted. If you wanted your house painted, you would have to ask the King. Every day the king would spend long hours with the minister of Composition, who would know all the houses in the country, had an exact knowledge of the Royal Paint Budget, and could call in the painters.
Although almost everyone lived in the capital called Localhost the King would sometimes travel around the country and kindly hear peoples paint requests. Every night the King would return to his palace, talk to the minister of Composition, and then decide whether you could have your house painted, and when.
Then on a dark winter's night, a group of grumpy people thought how much more efficient it would be if everyone would talk to the minister of Composition directly. Thus the Wayland Conspiracy was born. The next day, at daybreak, they deposed the good King and made the minister of Composition the head of state: president Compositor. To cater for the few people in remote villages they re-appointed the King as secratary to the president: the Secretary for Remote Villages. He would still travel around the country (albeit in a suit, and without his crown). He would still talk to president Compositor every night, like in the old days.
The press in other counties, like Windonia and Applestan, were very positive: finally this backward country had a modern government. Now its poor inhabitants could have the same beautiful colored houses they had. Welcome to the modern world!
The people in the country itself didn't notice a lot of difference, however. In the old days things took a little longer, but not everyone needs his house painted every day. Many still called the Secretary for Remote Villages "King", especially in the countryside.
But the people in Windonia and Applestan were very satisfied: they always had felt that their geovernment was superior, and the Wayland revolution had proved their point.
The King just smiled.
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Friends, Country Men (and Women)!
This propaganda is exactly that which the Royalists would have you believe - without telling the complete story of waste and unsightliness they would foist upon us once again should we believe their lies!
Our royalist friend has failed to mention that under the Kings rule, some houses would remain half painted for a full day! It was due to the King having only limited time with which to grant delegation powers to the Minister of Composition who was powerless to get painting d
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A strange tale from a strange land.
I live in a country where the painting is done in each village by their respective mayor and painters. And every citizen of my country is free to own multiple houses, some in different villages. Upon needing my fishing cabin, ski chalet or vacation home painted, I simply submit the request to the local mayor.
Some mayors are unhappy with this arrangement, as it tends to undermine their tax base and political power. Were it that there was only one Compositor mayor availabl
Daniel Stone core X.o dev on what's wrong with X (Score:5, Informative)
I believe he's still part of X.org anyway, but he's working exclusively on Wayland.
For everyone that disparages Wayland without really understanding anything about Wayland, which seems to be most everyone, I highly recommend listening to this talk by a core X.org developer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 [youtube.com]
TL;DR points:
- X11 is no longer "network transparent" and hasn't been so in a long time, due to reliance on DRI, Xrender, Xvideo, etc.
- X11 is already used in a manner that is similar to Wayland but with a very poor inter-process communication layer and synchronization issues, with most of X11's core bypassed (server-side fonts, drawing APIs, etc).
- X11 when used remotely is already like VNC, but very poor at it. Lots of round-trips, etc, all to show bitmaps.
In the end, there are a few things I need from Wayland, and I think they will be there in the end:
- app-based network transparency, not just remote desktop
- middle click paste. Maybe done with a virtual frame buffer and rdp to ship the final rendering across the wire.
- customizable focus policy (focus follows mouse, click to raise)
- user replaceable window/composite managers
I suspect we'll lose a few features that very few people use such as using a remote window manager to manage windows on a local server. For example, running Xming on Windows, and then running metacity or even twm on my remote linux machine. A full remote desktop would probably be the way to go here with wayland. And faster.
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X11 is not dead. As you point out, the "next-game challengers" have yet to prove themselves viable. If you want to be relevant today you support the technology that actually exists.
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OK, I'm logged in and I'll say it. X11 works fine for me. Call me an idiot, call it a hack, make all the loaded statements you want; it doesn't change that fact. It works fine for me as a user.
or, do the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
If all of the competent people working on Wayland would stop wasting time on it and improve the X server, think how much better it might be.
Wayland lacks absolutely necessary features (true "over the net" and root window access, for example) for a significant number of applications and users. Until it has those, even if only through X emulation, it is simply not ready for use by me, and a lot of people like me.
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If all of the competent people working on Wayland would stop wasting time on it and improve the X server, think how much better it might be.
Fairly obviously you're not a developer, because if you were you'd know that after a certain point a codebase can't be fixed. Long-live deeply engrained problems in a system cannot just be fixed. Sometimes you need to start again with fresh perspective, without having to live with choices made 10 years ago.
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Re:or, do the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
It's selfish of you to inflict your view of the world
WTF?
He's done nothing more than you have - post to slashdot. Get off your high horse.
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And he could argue that you are selfishly trying to make everyone take a step over a precipice; a step that is absolutely not necessary. Perhaps if you could explain why Wayland finds it necessary to discard features users have found so helpful, then we could think about evaluating the rest of the issue.
Re:or, do the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
You are insignificant in the face of our needs.
Back in the olden days of the Windows versus Linux flamewars--when it still mattered and OSX didn't exist, this was exactly the sort of arguments the Windows people used to make about Linux features.
Then the attitude was hackish and anything you could do seemed reasonable/fun/cool because, why insult what another user wants to do? It's their system after all. That sort of attitude was why a lot of us came to Linux and OSS in the first place.
It's sad to see that "begone you insignificant peon" is now infiltating the OSS culture. Please leave. Regardless of the merits of this particular fight, your attitude is total poison. Take it somewhere it can't do any damage.
Re:or, do the opposite (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow such stunning lack of vision. You and a bunch of other people latched on to this network transparency is to pricey a feature conception back in the late 90's and just can't let it go.
Let me clue you in. In Computing everything that is old is new again. We move back and fourth between centralization and decentralization. The current direction of things is toward centralization again. Just listen to people who keep saying cloud, PC over IP, and visualization. Then consider all the tablet and not quite designed to be a standalone machine hardware/software stacks being sold.
Windows got a leg up from being on the right spot of the curve at the right time. They built a comparatively simple localized talk directly to the hardware display solution during the decentralization trend. That served very well in the late 90's and early 2000's when everyone was focused on doing CAD and playing video games on their desktops. The hardware has gotten faster and the work around hacked into X.org have allowed it to mostly keep up though. Now the fact is the X.org model is broken too, modern toolkits are not using the drawing primatives and spend most of their time doing what amounts to pushing bitmaps around which does not offer really great network transparency. X.org needs a major rework; X11 was a solution for a slightly different set of problems than we have today, but just because it might not be the right specific solution now, does not be something else automatically is or that the fundamental concepts behind X are wrong.
Network transparency is NOT a misfeature and its NOT a niche use case.
Citrix and others are falling all over themselves right now trying to figure out how to export a rich application experiences from Microsoft's shitty non network transparent desktop and server platform backed by powerful hardware to Apple, and Microsoft's shitty tablet platforms. Xenprise is all about application network transparency; because people can't/don't want to try and deal with local storage and computation on their tablets.
If you want the UNIX/Linux world to enjoy the sort of success Windows did in the 95-2005 years its about catering to the centralization, decentralization cycle and having a modern ( ie not X11, but maybe an X12) display solution that is hardware independent, portable, and network transparent absolutely is the thing to do. Plan for 2015 - 2025 rather than trying to implement the ideas and compromises of 1995. Wayland and Mir are backward looking.
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X.org needs a major rework; X11 was a solution for a slightly different set of problems than we have today, but just because it might not be the right specific solution now, does not be something else automatically is or that the fundamental concepts behind X are wrong.
However, even assuming X11 is fundamentally sound, it does not necessarily follow that the best solution is rewriting it. Writing even a good new thing may be more efficient.
If you want the UNIX/Linux world to enjoy the sort of success Windows did in the 95-2005 years its about catering to the centralization, decentralization cycle and having a modern ( ie not X11, but maybe an X12) display solution that is hardware independent, portable, and network transparent absolutely is the thing to do. Plan for 2015 - 2025 rather than trying to implement the ideas and compromises of 1995. Wayland and Mir are backward looking.
I think it's important to remember that MS didn't really know what they should be doing - except for the NT kernel, which I hear is beautiful.
Until XP arrived, desktops used 95, 98 and ME. 98 would last about a day on my box before crashing, while 2000 pretty much just didn't crash on the same hardware. 95 shipped without TCP/IP, and Mi
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Let me clue you in. In Computing everything that is old is new again. We move back and fourth between centralization and decentralization. The current direction of things is toward centralization again. Just listen to people who keep saying cloud, PC over IP, and visualization. Then consider all the tablet and not quite designed to be a standalone machine hardware/software stacks being sold.
That's generally only true with respect to companies which are making $$$ from selling something 'new' every other year.
Networking has not, and will not, become obsolete, or less important.
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Oh really? Tell that to all the people using linux (etc) in the corporate world, who are generally only using X because of remote applications. I'm sure all those engineers, geophysicists etc would like to be told that they are not important and that desktop based computing is all that matters.
I find it astonishing that you are still pushing the single user non-networked idea in 2013 when even mobile telephones rely on large numbers
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Many? Try naming one.
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You and your friends are a tiny fraction of the overall number of X users. You are insignificant in the face of our needs.
Not true.
The not "tiny fraction of the overall" desktop users are migrating in droves to tablets/etc.
Last time I checked neither Android, iOS nor Windows 8 employ X or Wayland.
That is kind of the problem with the change Wayland brings: the people who need it most in two 2-5 years time would be 90% on tablets.
The only notable exception is the SteamOS and gaming. But it, if it lives on, would be guaranteed to be a fork, living in its own universe. And that's the only place where I see any kind of pote
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Before the using via network (remote X) is available for wayland, and includes root windowless mode, most of non-hobbyist users (in heterogenic corporate environments and such) will never switch over. There's nothing to get excited of if you aren't at even half-way feature parity.
There is now support for remote use [slashdot.org]. There is also a full screen mode [phoronix.com], if that's what you mean by root windowless.
The main issue at the moment is that it is new - I doubt if it is as stable as X - and the limited supporting applications.
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What is this, Spinrad's The Iron Dream?
Re:Can we have a discussion - not a slagging match (Score:5, Informative)
No, this is Slashdot, you can't have a serious discussion.
It's full of idiots who don't like shiny new things, idiots who adore shiny new things and both types of idiots love to shout at each other.
Ok. Seriously.
Wayland is a new architecture for the Linux graphics stack.
It merges the role of the display server and the window manager/compositor into one piece, called the Wayland compositor.
It is envisioned that writing a Wayland compositor is not more complicated than writing a X window manager/compositor.
Buttet point: We will not have A Wayland compositor, but serveral of them to choose from: Weston, Enlightenment, Mutter/Gnome Shell, KWin.
This is made possible because a) Linux now has a proper graphic driver stack and b) the Wayland protocol is much simpler.
The new model and the simplified protocol will allow
A) better control of the input (keyboard, mice). Currently, the X window manager/compositor do not have absolute control about the input. Besides posing some security risks, it makes it hard to implement some behaviors sanely. Things as simple as being able to mute the sound when you have a full screen application running are hard to do.
Wayland compositors, of course, get all the input and then they forward them to applications as they see fit.
B) better performance (except OpenGL full screen applications which already mostly bypass X). This will come from a number of place.
- Reduced number of rountrips (W app/W compositor/kernel instead of X app/X server/X compositor/X compositor/kernel).
- Better implementation (the X.org server isn't the fastest cookie in the world, but the protocol is so complex it's hard to do better)
- On embedded platforms (phones, tablets, Raspberri Pi) the compositor can be written to exploit hardware compositing capabilites (there's no good way to expose it though the X server).
Additionally, the Wayland protocol fixes several issues, some of which could be fixed with more extensions, some need breaking.
- Artifacts/tearing. X doesn't specify when the data sent by applications is drawn on the screen, so sometimes you get artifacts as the server or compositor draw the contents of a window in the middle of an application drawing. Wayland fixes this by making every frame perfect.
- Saner input model. The currently used X input extensions are too complicated (by the authors own admission), as they need to maintain backward compatibility with the X Core input model.
- Saner dynamic reconfiguration (resolution, orientation). Again, by authors admission, XRandR is too complicated.
- Binding versioning. Currently, if you have an application built upon components who support different versions of an extension (ie, input), it's a russian roulette on how it will pan out.
Bullet point: despite all the drama going on on Slashdot and other sites, the simple truth is that the majority, if not all, of the developers who actually put in time and effort to maintain and upgrade the X.org server, the X window managers we use, the application toolkits, etc seem convinced Wayland is the way forward and are putting in the time and effort needed to make it happen.
Wayland is not network transparent. And despite the drama, that's OK. Nobody cares about network transparency.
People (including me) do care about having rootless remote applications. We care to have something that works at least as well as "ssh -X".
For the short/medium term, Wayland desktops will run a X compatibility server (XWayland) and most Wayland capable applications will have a X fallback mode. So "ssh -X" will just keep working.
For a longer term solution, when we get Wayland only applications, we'll need to implement something like NX or Xpra for Wayland. Which is OK too, because for many of us, it's better than running X over the network.
Despite the capabilities of the X protocol, most X applications are in fact too bandwidth intensive and latency sensitive to run remotely outside LANs. And their developers can't be arsed to do it otherwise. That's why we use things like NX and Xpra in the first place.