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Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

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Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#81

Post by barnaby »

dfranke wrote: post #72
cookiecaper wrote: post #62

Unless 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…

You're right, which is why I'll continue to stick with Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS while this all blows over. It will blow over, however, and I'm happy to have a major player out there forcing it to happen.

We use Ubuntu LTS at work because of the stability.

On my laptop at home though (which I only really use for watching movies, and for hacking on side-projects that one day may become HN stories) I'm always on cutting edge Ubuntu. I love the thrill of the beta's.

So I'll do the dual strategy of letting it blow over for work purposes, and playing around in the mud for personal purposes.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#83

Post by thingie »

barrkel wrote: post #50
paol wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I loved reading the Unix haters handbook it gets many things wrong. It gets a lot right too, but the point is it takes some critical thinking (and good knowledge of Unix) to tell which is which. In that respect I found the chapter on X to be one of the weakest. They trot out the old "X named the client and server the wrong way around" chestnut for example...

Well, the naming is one thing; the architecture itself is worse. It's far more likely today for you to want to run applications on a server and be able to connect to and disconnect from them, like VNC or much better RDP, than it is for you to want all your applications running on the server to terminate when you disconnect your machine from the network.

There is nothing preventing any application to connect to another X display and push all its windows there, even if the original display session terminates. Emacs can sort of do that, for example, and there are some traces that something like that was intended even for GTK. But no application actually work in such conditions.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#84

Post by thingie »

dfranke wrote: post #82
jamii wrote: post #68

I guess this means someone is going to have to port xmonad...

You mean all 2000 lines or so of the core that almost everything else is built on?

Xmonad core doesn't provide any kind of X11 encapsulation and convenience interface, every single xmonad extension, any piece of configuration, can (and does) directly use X11, both API and behavior. After all, it's an X11 window manager. You have to rewrite everything.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#85

Post by loewenskind »

benmccann wrote: post #35
jbk wrote: post #28

I 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.

My fear is lack of remote desktop. I would never use a Linux desktop without NX support.

Remote desktop is easy, there's no reason to make it the focus of the GUI subsystem.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#86

Post by loewenskind »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #27
mahmud wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does make for a ridiculous API though. No one writes X for this reason, but I suspect it would speed things up a lot if everyone writing for the platform didn't have to go through multiple layers of better APIs to talk to the actual display subsystem.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#87

Post by loewenskind »

skymt wrote: post #31
alexyoung wrote: post #26

I'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." http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

I'd rather see Wayland implement the X protocol themselves rather than proxy to Xorg. Running X and Wayland simultaneously could have performance implications on older computers or netbooks, two of Ubuntu's biggest targets.

Why would running two systems help performance. A better designed system that doesn't have to have network transparency code paths should be able to run faster than X and Linux applications are written in Qt or GTK anyway. Port those two and call it done.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#88

Post by loewenskind »

thingie wrote: post #45
FooBarWidget wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

Well, it's an X server, in fact :-) It uses the parts of X server that were moved to the kernel in the last year or two (KMS, large part of graphic drivers). Wayland itself is very small, you can look into the source code to find anything you want to know, it's all there, easy to find. That's the good thing, perhaps, breaking that large and ugly X thing into small parts that we can easily understand, check, improve.…

Neither OSX nor Windows use X and both of them look much nicer. In my opinion the last 20 years of X were a mistake that should have been aborted a long time ago. Both Windows and OSX do remote desktop just fine for the minority who need it.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#89

Post by fhars »

maguay wrote: post #73

With the Software Center, Unity interface, and now a new display server, looks like Ubuntu is shooting for the mainstream OS business. Interesting to see an Linux distro trying so hard to set itself apart.

Ubuntu has always been shooting for the mainstream, it is the central goal of the project. Just look at bug 1.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#90

Post by loewenskind »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #12
mahmud wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

That's not what I get from [1] at all. Maybe that was the case once but it looks like it replaces X now.

[1] http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

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