Wayland (X11 replacement) 1.0 Officially Released
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
Here on the intertubes, it's easy to condemn someone for poor usage, however, remember that communicating complex ideas in a second (or sometimes third, or fourth) language is not always the easiest thing to do. Not everyone grew up soaking in it.
This is not an excuse for poor English - but is certainly a legitimate defense against condescending fucktards such as yourself.
Michael has dedication but not much else. If someone was interested, there is some real low-hanging fruit in that niche.
So perhaps we have a different definition of 'is fine.' :-) Have you run X11 on an RpI ? did you think that was fine?
(The workaround is to use the nouveau driver, which is fairly capable as long as you're not trying to play 3D games)
For me the thought of losing nvidia driver support on Ubuntu is rather scary given the current state of all other 3D drivers (and certainly other Distro's might follow with Wayland). I hope the status of other drivers improves a lot before that switch or 3D on Linux will be set back a lot.
Also, given the number of people using Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, my guess would be that Ubuntu will not switch to Wayland until the compatibility issue is solved.
The X11 and Linux display landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. I think that nVidia chose the wise strategy of "wait and see" to pinpoint what stabilizes and have since been working on porting pieces of their proprietary driver. The recent addition of XRandR 1.2+ support probably has more to do with the announcement of Optimus development than anything else, and this work is probably a precursor to a version that supports KMS and the other technologies that will be required for compatibility into the next five years of Linux desktop.
You just can't innovate using them.
(I haven't tried it out yet, but Google searches confirm TI is doing this)
I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar to the way you can run X11 applications in
I also think that Wayland will replace X11 in the way that most of the X11 developers will move to Wayland. X11 will still be around, and probably still be supported by window managers for quite a while though.
1. Wayland is actually the protocol/API, which window managers/compositors and the applications that run in them will implement. The reference compositor for the Wayland project is called Weston.
This comment must have been submitted from an X11 application running in MacOS X. I am having the s
[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-li...
This is my main issue with Wayland. Whence portability?
Which X11 features are still missing? Does Wayland support X11's seemless remote multiuser sessions already?
I've googled around and found this fresh message from April 2012:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/0538250/update-on-wa...
"... X11 support on Wayland. It's basically ready to go, but window management is implemented only as a hack right now."
That doesn't sound good. It seems that Wayland will have a hard time to replace X11 in the next decade. Currently I see no reason why I should switch.
The reason you will switch is that plain X11 goes unsupported and will not work on modern systems.
The initial thing you will switch is not Wayland proper, it's just X11 sitting on top of Wayland. Thinking of Wayland as a competing display server is as of now not really realistic -- it's much better to think it as a refactoring of the internals of the system that uses X and compositors, taking the parts of both that need privileges on the system and really fast communication and merging them together in Wayland, leaving the rest of the parts into X.
This is already the way OnLive, for example, works. All the rendering is done on the server side, which corresponds to the Wayland/X11 client.
However, even smartphones are coming with highly capable GPUs these days, so within a few years, any CPU no matter how cheap will be able to handle at least casual gaming at HD resolutions.
Remoting isn't as important when you have options like VNC to fall back on. Its a minor inconvenience at the most and I believe the've made the right call to ship something usable now.
Regularly, I have to give support to portugal or italia, they open a internet connection, so that I can log on their system. With a simple ssh -Y, I can perform all the investigations I need.
I have NoMachine NX on my home computer. It is very useful, but it is far more heavy weight than a simple ssh with X11 forwarding.
"Screen for X"
[1] Yes, I know there are exceptions.
X separates the thing that paints the screen (the X server) from the things that computes (the X client).
Your idea or pushing pixels means that you need a virtual screen on the machine where programs runs and you want to copy this virtual screen to your screen. Do you imagine the complexity of window management with such a setup ? Have you already launched many VNC clients at the same time ?
Some people claim it depends on adequately configuring X, which may be true, but it's much easier to configure VNC over SSH to have an acceptable performance
On Windows or OSX though... If you were going to install X11 why not skip it and just install VNC?
VNC is no alternative for running individual applications remotely. Remote desktop != remote X.
Still, most of the time, running only one application is not the usage model. Or it's a simple thing that doesn't need X, just ssh
If you need remoting, for probably a fairly long way into the future, X11 will still be supported and you can use that. If you want the new shininess of Wayland, sorry, you have to live without remote capabilities.
For the future Wayland might be the correct way forward but I do not see any short term gain for the users.
1. Development of X is slow. Like "the kernel supports switching between gpus flawlessly but X needs a restart"-slow. Users notice this (though I don't know the current situation of this issue).
2. X-window-managers have awful performance compared to Windows. Try dragging a window around in IceWM or every other Linux desktop. It looks like hell, flickering borders and such. Though I remember a interview with the developer who did the first push for a new scheduler before cfq as he quit kernel-development who tried to tune the kernel for this, so this hasn't to be X fault. Just found it, Con Kolivas and http://apcmag.com/interview_with_con_kolivas_part_1_computin... Point is: The desktop of Linux is slow and maybe Wayland will help.
3. (It is always more) That it is a mess to develop for X (and it is) leads to bugs user will notice.
So pardon me while I braindump...
It would be an interesting project to integrate an Android-style permissions permissions system(possibly using SELinux) complete with per-application virtual filesystems (using FUSE) into the system package manager. So, for example, you install a music player, the package manager sets up a virtual filesystem for it that lets the program see its own configuration directory and your music directory, but nothing else. The package manager asks if you'd like to allow network permissions to the music player (for downloading album art or whatever); if yes, a firewall rule is added specifically allowing that process to access the network, if not, none is.
One problem with that kind of system is that a lot of end-user desktop programs are written with the assumption that the entire home directory is fair game. I'm not convinced that's really necessary, though. In case a program occasionally wants to access a file outside of its normal sandbox (say, you just downloaded a podcast into your downloads directory and want to play it with that music player I mentioned previously) you could always have the supervising program ask the user if it's okay to temporarily add that file to the program's sandbox. If it happens in an expected way (e.g. the user clicks on a media file in the file manager) you could safely grant access to the file without explicitly asking the user.
Something like that, on a distro using Wayland as the windowing system (to avoid the gaping security holes in X), would provide 90% of the security that Qubes does with significantly less inconvenience to the user. It would still require a good deal of work for the package maintainers, but perhaps a distro like that could implement something like the AUR [2] so users could do a lot of the packaging work for peripheral packages.