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Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

digitizor.com

121–130 of 160 posts

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#121
post #63

God! 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.

I recommend Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#122
post #10

"Ditch X server" sounds like they're going to completely abandon X11. However, the Wayland FAQ[1] outlines ways of integrating X11 with Wayland, so I suppose users of, say, ddd are not going to suffer much. 1. https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/f...

If this gains sufficient traction, and if this provides a better-looking way to render stuff on screen, I guess this will lead to applications that talk the superior protocol, not The X protocol. Such applications would not run on X displays.

If I interpret things correctly, the link you give explicitly describes such a scenario:

Further down the road we run a user session natively under Wayland with clients written for Wayland.  There will still (always) be X applications to run, but we now run these under a root-less X server that is itself a client of the Wayland server.  This will inject the X windows into the Wayland session as native looking clients.  The session Wayland server can run as a nested Wayland server under the system Wayland server described above, maybe even side by side with X sessions.

So, the X protocol could still be there for quite some time to support 'old' applications, but new applications wouldn't use it anymore.

There are quite a few if's here, though. The first non-Ubuntu application to drop X support could face quite an uphill battle.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#123
post #40
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?

Uh, NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago. Within that ecosystem , Ubuntu is too big to ignore.

"As NVIDIA did not release all the needed documentation for its graphics chip, the development is under the nouveau project which uses reverse engineering to get it to work. Nouveau has been pulled to 2.6.33 kernel. This will allow to use kernel-based mode-setting for NVIDIA cards with this driver."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-setting

That's some heavy commitment to support Linux right there.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#124
post #80

I've been unhappy with X since I learned enough (in the 90s) to have an opinion -- but not for the reason Shuttleworth gives: "We don’t believe X is setup to deliver the user experience we want, with super-smooth graphics and effects. I understand that it’s possible to get amazing results with X, but it’s extremely hard, and isn’t going to get easier. Some of the core goals of X make it harder to achieve these user e…

In that case, I think you'll hate future Ubuntu because (like its mentor OS X) it won't be very configurable at all. Easy things will be easy and everything else will be impossible.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#125
post #81
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where do you work? If you're allowed to say, I'm always interested in hearing about Linux deployments, much less Ubuntu and/or professional "desktop" Linux usage.

There should be an Ubuntu testimonials website... Weekend project?

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#127
post #4
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 :-|

The idea of Wayland growing and becoming a more usable platform sound terrific. The troubling part about this is ubuntu's history of doing what's good for ubuntu.

Why is it troubling for a company or organization to do what's in their best interest?

Ubuntu's goals do not seem to be nefarious, and almost everything they're pushing for the community is open-source, except Ubuntu One and the Software Center ability to purchase apps.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#128
post #40
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?

Uh, NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago. Within that ecosystem , Ubuntu is too big to ignore.

They support Linux because of the graphics companies that use Linux. They're all on RHEL, not Ubuntu.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#129
post #101
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it doesn't happen on other drivers, so the fact that NVidia is replacing a lot of the X11 arcitecture makes sense that they would be the only ones to have this problem.

Re: Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

#130

Just 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 no Wayland-only applications as yet, and Wayland can run X11 applications transparently. The plan is to essentially host the X server on Wayland, which can interact with the GPU in a slightly more sane way.

My condolences for the Intel card. Intel had good support for many years, until... last year or so... when the Intel developers totally lost the plot and decided to break everything for everyone. And they are refusing to fix it for older cards :(.

The nice thing about hobbyist developers is that they tend to be more responsible to their users.

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