Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#101

Post by bobds » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 4:44 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #77

naner wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That must be why XMonad has funky artifacting on window borders when a monitor is rotated under the Nvidia drivers. I could never understand that (as it works fine when the monitors aren't rotated 90deg).

I'd guess that has something to do with different subpixel orientations.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#102

Post by maguay » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 4:59 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #98

fhars wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Link, for those that haven't seen it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

Thanks, I'd never seen that. Very humorous :)

They should make another one:

Bug #2: Apple has a majority mind-share

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#103

Post by niels_olson » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 5:05 PM UTC

alextgordon wrote: post #56

rufugee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and it made starting up any X-based application on OS X a real pain. X apps are second-class citizens. This is one (of many) reasons I could never quite reach a level of comfort on a Mac.

It's a calculated move on Apple's part. They don't want you to use X11, so they make it as painful as possible while still keeping it usable so that developers can't write new apps for it (they have to use Cocoa). It's strictly compatibility environment only.

> It's a calculated move on Apple's part.

that seems unlikely in light of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872915

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#104

Post by niels_olson » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 5:14 PM UTC

notauser wrote: post #34

pilom wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I was selling software to defense companies I'd support IE6. If I was selling software to primary school teachers I'd support 800x600. If I was selling technology to engineers (especially CUDA types building render farms of thousands of nodes) you can bet your life I'd support Ubuntu. I wouldn't want to give them any reasons at all not to use my stuff everywhere, in case I accidentally opened a niche my competitor…

As a military consumer of defense industry products, please, for the love of humanity, do not support IE6. Even NMCI, AHLTA, and SPAWAR now support at least IE7. A fair chunk of the Army and Air Force are now Vista and Win7.

As the father of 8 and 5 year-olds, please don't support 800x600. Even in New Orleans after the storm, with my wife working in the public schools, I didn't see any 800x600 displays.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#105

Post by jfb » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 5:21 PM UTC

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #33

tumult wrote: post #21

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.

A while ? You must have never read the UNIX-HATERS Handbook ( http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf ), which should be required reading for any unix fan, along with the Plan9 design documents (cat-v.org). In this case, "the X Windows disaster" chapter seems most appropriate. Feel free to ignore the VMS fanboys, though. And yes, I am a dedicated unix (OpenBSD) user.

Someone should update the Hater's handbook. Many of the problems have been papered over, but few if any have been fixed. And I say this as someone who's lived inside Unix of one sort or another since '86.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#106

Post by crs » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 5:25 PM UTC

darklajid wrote: post #29

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Well it appears that waylands first deployment is expected to be in MeeGo OS. So that implies Qt support will be developed and pushed by Nokia and Intel.

Furthermore if you checkout waylands site, you can see screenshots of various Qt and Gtk based applications running on Wayland.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#107

Post by sedachv » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 5:30 PM UTC

loewenskind wrote: post #86

FooBarWidget wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the "X API"? Are you talking about Xlib? XCB? The protocol? Does this critique include XRender?

There's really two parts to modern X programming: the window and event stuff, and XRender. The window and event system isn't bad, and it's fully asynchronous, which is a really big deal. XRender obviously can't be used for drawing by hand (that's why you have Cairo), but it's a really good design for a drawing protocol that supports a lot of possibilities for hardware acceleration.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#108

Post by barkingcat » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 5:40 PM UTC

sqrt17 wrote: post #43

sgt wrote: post #5

I have no worries about this. Linux distributions always do a couple of releases of "disasters", (e.g. KDE 4) before it starts becoming stable. Wayland is theoretically superior and with iteration after iteration, I'm sure it's going to come out on top. Just don't be one of the early adopters, but that's a given when it comes to Ubuntu, in my experience (unless you really do like the risks involved with cutting edge…

Have you ever tried to repair things in a new car with electronic fuel injection and computer-driven brakes? A huge advantage of X11 and all that other "70s technology" is that you can fix things more easily because it's built for being maintainable in the first place. Having said that, I think that splitting the X server into one lightweight compositing manager and one slightly less heavyweight X-server-on-top-of-th…

I'm not sure about the easy to fix concept. By all accounts the X codebase is one nasty beast to wrap your head around. The protocols are well documented, but the actual code - it takes some crazy digging to actually understand it enough to be able to fix things in X-land.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#109

Post by cjtenny » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 5:41 PM UTC

does this mean my hometown will fade into even greater obscurity (as quantified by google search results)?

:(

http://www.wayland.k12.ma.us/

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#110

Post by sedachv » Fri, Nov 05, 2010, 5:51 PM UTC

loewenskind wrote: post #88

thingie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Neither OSX nor Windows use X and both of them look much nicer."

What does the graphics design of OSX and Windows have to do with how X is architected? Which effects provided by the OSX or Windows interface cannot be done by a compositing X window manager?

"Both Windows and OSX do remote desktop just fine for the minority who need it."

X network transparency has nothing to do with remote desktop - as a matter of fact X doesn't have that notion or any support for it. The X protocol is strictly for per-application event and drawing. There is a huge class of problems that X can solve where remote desktop would be useless.