Sigh,my first job was to work on a proprietary X-server extension. Despite Jim Gettys' and Keith Packard's continued interest, and some interest from vendors as well, X seems to be losing hacker mind share. There were some fast proprietary X servers made by a few companies like Xig graphics that delivered truly incredible performance. But the really exciting things that could be done with X never saw daylight outside a small community of display manufacturers for defense, air-traffic control, etc
Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
61–70 of 160 posts
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#62Unless they're planning this for 13.04 or later, it definitely sounds like a bad deal. Wayland just moved to a "real" project space outside of Kristian's personal repo, and it is nowhere near mature enough to support something like Ubuntu. Even if GTK and QT "mostly work", there's still a lot more in the X ecosystem that is hard to replace, namely proprietary drivers and the knowledgebase associated with working with X.
Even Ubuntu has a history of pushing out reliable, mature applications for much less mature ones on the basis of theoretical improvements. Look at Empathy and Pidgin; I still get crashes from Empathy all the time, the skinning and font-size support have problems, etc., whereas Pidgin just works great. Why couldn't they have just affixed the Telepathy backend as a major player in Pidgin, or at least forked and made Empathy a Pidgin derivative? It would have worked out much better.
I'm just hoping that Arch doesn't freak out and fear that Ubuntu is becoming more "bleeding edge" than Arch and remove X for Wayland in the next three weeks.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#63God! I can hardly stand to read the digitizor website from all the crap they have jacked up and hyperlinked for advertising.
I'm on Chrome. Is there a feature that lets you get control of that mess?
Edit: I apologize for the off-topic posting, but the linked website is a good example of what readers of Hacker News seem to have tricks for handling.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#64I 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.
I agree. X is one of the reasons I'm not terribly fond of Linux. I don't know if wayland will help, but trying new things is defintiely good for innovation and advancement, so I'm completely in favour of this move. Hopefully something awesome will come of it!
Since it is backed by Intel and Nokia something positive should happen.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#65This is the actual announcement by Shuttleworth:
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Window management is largely pushed to the clients, they draw their own decorations and move and resize themselves, typically implemented in a toolkit library.
Well, there's a bad idea. I suppose I could see an X replacement which incorporated window management into the server, instead of into a special client; but letting all the clients draw their own borders is a recipe for chaos.
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#67Just one question, I hear that Wayland is hugely dependent on the latest Graphics cards. So that would mean that ubuntu will no longer be usable by people like me who have moderately old hardware (mine is p4 with on board intel graphics, which are already having problems even with X). I liked how ubuntu was stable on my computer (till around 8.10 I think and 9.04 was not bad). I will miss the compatibility
Same here. My three year old laptop has gotten slower with every consecutive release of Ubuntu. I'm afraid to upgrade to the latest let alone to this new GL-based display server. Guess I'll just have to switch to a 'lighter' distro with less fireworks. I'm sure it will pay off for Ubuntu in the end... I just hope it doesn't actually start a trend for other distros to follow suit.
I switched to puppy linux and am loving the no-os-on-my-HD style (of course I can do a frugal install, but I am just lazy)
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#68I guess this means someone is going to have to port xmonad...
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#69Just one question, I hear that Wayland is hugely dependent on the latest Graphics cards. So that would mean that ubuntu will no longer be usable by people like me who have moderately old hardware (mine is p4 with on board intel graphics, which are already having problems even with X). I liked how ubuntu was stable on my computer (till around 8.10 I think and 9.04 was not bad). I will miss the compatibility
There are light-weight versions of ubuntu available. And if that doesn't work, you can go to even lighter linux distros like Puppy Linux that load everything to ram and run like lightning.
Bottom line: you're good to go
Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland
#70This 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…
It will be several years before we need to worry about that. Nvidia's drivers actually replace a huge chunk of the Xorg graphics stack because it has sucked so terribly[1] for many years.
1: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/06/nitty-gritty-shit-on...