I give this the thumbs-up. I'm not particularly fond of X11. In fact, I suspect it has been holding back GUI on GNU/Linux for a while.
Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
21–30 of 160 posts
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#22This is a huge shift if it happens. X has been synonymous with GUIs on unix for more than 20 years, and has accumulated all the attendant baggage (both good and bad).
There are also some big consequences for the linux landscape. The first and obvious one is that if other distros don't imitate Ubuntu they will drift farther apart. People complain about Ubuntu going their own way now, image what it will be like if they're on Wayland+Unity and others stick to X+Base Gnome.
Another, subtler consequence of Shuttleworth's announcement is the message it sends to graphics card vendors (well, NVIDIA really). Wayland is dependent on the newest linux graphics stack, very much by design. But that stack is relatively new (e.g. kernel mode setting) and nvidia never updated their driver architecture to match. I assume this will force their hand because Ubuntu is too big to ignore.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wayland uses OpenGL ES for rendering, preparing Ubuntu for handsets. Ubuntu must be eying a future alongside Android, which is an excellent bet. There have been many attempts at X replacement, all well justified, and if Wayland is the best of them, it would still be better than the baroque X protocol. Like almost every C++ programmer working in the early 00s, I too hacked on Berlin :-|
It looks like Wayland runs on top of X, not replacing X. Which makes sense. OpenGL is just an API, not a hardware wire-level protocol. Unless Wayland implements its own graphics drivers (which I find highly unlikely), it'll just make use of the same drivers that X uses for implementing OpenGL. And that still leaves things like input handling. From the Wikipedia entry it looks like Wayland uses X for input and renderi…
It doesn't seem like that's mandatory, though it can run on top of X. From the project's front page blurb:
The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers.
They do have fairly well thought out plans for a (probably lengthy) transition of interoperating with X applications, though: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wayland uses OpenGL ES for rendering, preparing Ubuntu for handsets. Ubuntu must be eying a future alongside Android, which is an excellent bet. There have been many attempts at X replacement, all well justified, and if Wayland is the best of them, it would still be better than the baroque X protocol. Like almost every C++ programmer working in the early 00s, I too hacked on Berlin :-|
It looks like Wayland runs on top of X, not replacing X. Which makes sense. OpenGL is just an API, not a hardware wire-level protocol. Unless Wayland implements its own graphics drivers (which I find highly unlikely), it'll just make use of the same drivers that X uses for implementing OpenGL. And that still leaves things like input handling. From the Wikipedia entry it looks like Wayland uses X for input and renderi…
This is straight from this FAQ:
Wayland is a nano display server, relying on drm modesetting, gem batchbuffer submission and hw initialization generally in the kernel. Wayland puts the compositing manager and display server in the same process. Window management is largely pushed to the clients, they draw their own decorations and move and resize themselves, typically implemented in a toolkit library.
That last part about integrating the compositing manager and display server into the same process .. that's your main point of departure.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#25Named after Wayland the smith? Who killed the kids of his employer and fashioned goblets out of their skulls? Erm…
Something about the performance review process, possibly:
"[...] he was captured in his sleep by King Niðhad in Nerike who ordered him hamstrung and imprisoned [...]" (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_Smith).
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#26I'm not familiar with Wayland, so I read the architecture article:
"Wayland is a complete window system in itself, but even so, if we're migrating away from X, it makes sense to have a good backwards compatibility story."
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems less ambitious than Berlin in a lot of ways. One big difference is that Berlin aimed for network transparency (like X, but ideally done even better), while Wayland is local-only. That might simplify enough things to make it more likely to succeed. For me personally, now that nx makes X's network transparency actually usable, I'm not in a big hurry to go back to a non-network-transparent windowing system wi…
This seems less ambitious than Berlin in a lot of ways. Worse is better, and whoever ships a working prototype is best . Sacrificing network transparency for local performance should be a no-brainer, given the use-cases.
The bottleneck in X has never been network transparency. Local access has been accelerated through Unix domain sockets and shared memory for as long as I can remember. It looks like Wayland also has a client/server architecture which makes me suspect it's can be made network transparent just like X is.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#28I really wonder how we are going to manage Wayland for video:
- does it support Xv or the like? Or are we going to use the broken OpenGL drivers (no working overlay for most of them...)
- does it support VAAPI or VDPAU, that seems very linked to x11 too?
We'll see, but I have a bad feeling.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#29I have a worry of this turning out very badly.
The question is what worries you more. The somewhat stagnant, always lagging, always annoyingly close to usable Linux desktop experience or a pretty bold attempt at doing something about it.
Or - the possible collaboration/support problems.
Someone else quoted here that Wayland needs toolkit support for lots of things (moving, resizing, decorating). Are we going to see that support (possibly contributed in parts by Canonical) in gtk (and QT/KDE, fwiw)? Or is this basically going for Unity only?
In other words:
I appreciate a more modern, desktop oriented architecture. X11 seems just too much "Mainframe terminal" focused. Which is nice - but not on my laptop/netbook or in the majority of private use cases, really.
I fear, though, that this leads to a two classes of desktops for a while: The shiny Wayland one and the poor thing that still needs X11. Note that "fear" implies more emotions than reasoning - I don't know enough about Wayland support in other toolkits yet and don't understand how it could/would work with "arbitrary" setups (Open-/Fluxbox, lxde, one of the tiling wms).
Update: I was reading up on Wayland - and completely missed the blog entry from Mark. The statement "We’ll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there’s no reason for them not to be there on day one either." removes most of my fears.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#30This is a huge shift if it happens. X has been synonymous with GUIs on unix for more than 20 years, and has accumulated all the attendant baggage (both good and bad). There are also some big consequences for the linux landscape. The first and obvious one is that if other distros don't imitate Ubuntu they will drift farther apart. People complain about Ubuntu going their own way now , image what it will be like if the…
Ubuntu is certainly not too big to ignore. I have never seen any source say Linux (let alone Ubuntu) has more than 5% marketshare. Does your company support 800x600? How about IE6?