
Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland - dkd903
http://digitizor.com/2010/11/05/ubuntu-to-ditch-x-for-wayland/
======
paol
This 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.

~~~
pilom
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?

~~~
paol
Uh, NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago. _Within
that ecosystem_ , Ubuntu is too big to ignore.

~~~
sielskr
"NVIDIA made the decision to fully support linux a long time ago."

NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
"NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?"

Yes, I think they are because of contracts with big guys that need Linux on
things like supercomputers(almost all of them have linux inside).

~~~
azim
Interestingly enough, a lot of developers argue that Nvidia and ATI are in
violation of of the GPL by releasing proprietary drivers for Linux. The
language is unclear on whether or not the kernel's GPL license extends to
kernel loadable modules or not, many say it does.

------
tumult
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.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
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.

~~~
paol
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...

~~~
barrkel
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.

~~~
thingie
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.

------
gvb
Just for comparison, Apple "ditched" X too (they never used X). When they went
to OS X they used Display Postscript rather than X.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript>

This has been a mixed bag: it has been good for Apple-only programs, but it
significantly slowed and complicated the porting of existing and new X-based
programs to Apple.

~~~
rufugee
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.

~~~
alextgordon
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.

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

that seems unlikely in light of:

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

~~~
sipefree
AFAIK (I don't have the source right now), Apple originally considered using
X11 for the display server on OS X (in fact, early versions shipped with a
version of xf86 that ran natively as it does on other *nixes), but after
deciding on all the compositing and prettiness features that they wanted, they
would have torn so much out of X11 that it wouldn't be remotely compatible
anymore, so they wrote Quartz 2D.

Later, of course, things like Compiz came along, but they've always seemed
like weak hacks compared to things like Quartz. Hopefully wayland will change
everything.

~~~
flomo
This may be the explanation you are referring to:

[http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=67346...](http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612)

------
sgt
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 software).

The truth is, X is just too old fashioned and it's like trying to spend time
maintaining an old car from the 1970s instead of just buying a new car with
electronic fuel injection and excellent brakes.

~~~
sqrt17
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-the-
compositing-manager is less of a disaster than what we got with KDE4. I'll
only start worrying when KDE and Gnome catch up and they start having UI
programs talk directly to the compositing engine.

~~~
barkingcat
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.

------
lwhi
I think Mark Shuttleworth is taking bold steps to ensure that Ubuntu is well
positioned for the future. He's creating differentiation between Ubuntu and
other debian-type distributions and he's potentially mapping out a route to
new platforms.

It does seem like he might be a gambling man though.

~~~
daveungerer
Maybe gambling is too strong a word. He's not in it for the money, but to
create a viable competitor to Microsoft. So not taking this "gamble" and
sticking to the status quo would be actually be the riskier strategy for him.

If it backfires, it doesn't take him that much further away from achieving his
original goal.

------
limmeau
"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...](https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-
server/web/frequently-askeds-questions)

~~~
Someone
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.

~~~
xorglorb
So essentially it would be like Apple's X11. It will be there for backwards
compatibility with older applications, but it will be considered
"undesirable".

~~~
Someone
Yes, technocally, it would be like that. Sociologically, however, things would
be quite different; Apple's users did not have zillions of X applications that
they already used.

------
naner
This is the actual announcement by Shuttleworth:

<http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551>

------
cookiecaper
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 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.

~~~
dfranke
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.

~~~
barnaby
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.

~~~
lhnn
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?

------
sielskr
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
experiences on X than on native GL"

My unhappiness stems from my perception that the ways I have tried to
customize X and things closely coupled to X (e.g., my window manager) have
proved much more difficult (and in particular have forced me to contend with
much more _complexity_ ) than they could have.

~~~
wmf
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.

~~~
hasenj
Except the code will be open so if Canonical doesn't make it configurable,
other people can, and if they do it right without introducing unneeded
complexity, their patches might just make it upstream (Ubuntu).

This is assuming of course that people who like to fiddle with their display
will stay with Ubuntu.

Not many people like to do that anyway. But if there are people who want that
kind of control, it's not impossible.

------
Aegean
For me X has always symbolized old, hard to configure, clunky, and ugly. It
wasn't meant to be part of Unix but it mixed in. I am glad to see it go at
least from our desktops.

~~~
beza1e1
I found X quite easy to configure. Just set a few values in Xorg.conf and
nowdays it even works without this sometimes.

X11 as a protocol is old and mature like TCP or SMTP. Just like SMTP it has
some problems, but Wayland throws away some core features to fix it.
Hopefully, Wayland is flexible enough to get network transparency like X11 at
some point.

~~~
baq
>Just set a few values in Xorg.conf and nowdays it even works without this
sometimes.

you make it sound like it was an advantage.

------
macco
That is why I love Ubuntu: They like to take the bold decisions. Mark
Shuttleworth is a small Version of Steve Jobs :)

~~~
utku_karatas2
Let's say "open version".

~~~
macco
Nice own.

I met him personally. Totally incredable guy, who knows how to work with
people.

------
maguay
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.

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

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

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

They should make another one:

Bug #2: Apple has a majority mind-share

------
marcusfrex
That is factinating. What makes Mac OSX on desktop is based on Quartz and
Linux needed something like that to be more solid and modern on desktop
environments. So let be it.

------
alexyoung
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>

~~~
skymt
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.

~~~
loewenskind
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.

~~~
skymt
Sorry, I wasn't clear: running X alongside Wayland would _hurt_ performance
(at least in RAM-critical environments).

------
rams
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

~~~
bokchoi
_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_

What sort of exciting things?

~~~
beza1e1
Here is one vendor for example: <http://www.x-software.com>

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

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

~~~
thingie
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.

------
zokier
So the sound system is actually working again so lets break the display system
next.

------
chopsueyar
How will this affect LTSP and the future of thin clients with regards to
Ubuntu?

~~~
wmf
They'll probably use Wayland with SPICE.

~~~
chopsueyar
Do you have a link? All I can find is the circuit simulator results.

~~~
wmf
I can see how that would be confusing. I'm talking about Red Hat SPICE, a
replacement for VNC. <http://www.spicespace.org/>

------
topbanana
Is there a distribution I can download that is already using Wayland? I'd like
to take a look. For my part, the desktop manager is the one thing holding me
back from Linux. (OK, that and Visual Studio)

~~~
AntiRush
I don't believe so. Wayland is in the really early stage of development right
now, which makes me read this announcement as "Ubuntu is going to start
committing developers to Wayland.

You can build it with these instructions:
[https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-
server/web/b...](https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-
server/web/building-and-running-wayland) .

------
jbk
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.

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

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

------
motters
It looks as if Shuttleworth is concentrating squarely on desktop bling, and
this may be the right strategy if he wants Ubuntu to gain mass popularity and
really eat into the Windows user base.

~~~
StavrosK
How? From what I gather, Wayland is better for the mobile/touch space, servers
don't use GUIs and there's not much that uses _only_ X...

~~~
jrockway
So, did you post that comment from a mobile phone or a server?

Oh yeah, there's this thing called a "workstation". I hear there are a few in
existence...

~~~
StavrosK
That's odd, the comment I replied to was saying that x is useful for things
other than workstations, and I was saying that it wasn't more useful than
weyland on mobiles and servers.

I have no idea how this comment mixup happened...

------
templaedhel
>>After shocking everyone with the announcement that Ubuntu 11.04 will have
Unity on the desktop instead of GNOME Shell, >> Unity is going to use Wayland
display server instead of X. This will not be implemented in Ubuntu 11.04
however. >>X will remain until 11.04 however. I assume the last two relese
dates/version are incorrect, because unity is being added for 11.04, and the
article seemed to say the change to Wayland would happen after the change to
unity.

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

:(

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

------
augustl
I would just like to point out that Arch Linux with GNOME works just fine. I'm
sure there are tons of other distros out there, too, that work just fine. If
you don't like what's coming in Ubuntu, just switch. you probably won't notice
much difference between ubuntu 10.10 and [insert distro] with GNOME.

------
known
<http://www.microxwin.com/architecture.html>

------
mhd
Named after Wayland the smith? Who killed the kids of his employer and
fashioned goblets out of their skulls? Erm…

~~~
ableal
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>).

------
guest
I have a worry of this turning out very badly.

~~~
mahmud
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 :-|

~~~
FooBarWidget
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 rendering,
but other apps can connect to Wayland to have things rendered. Kind of like
how X itself works.

~~~
mahmud
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.

~~~
metageek
> _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.

~~~
hencq
Isn't an X window manager just another X client too at the moment? Couldn't
that system still work on Wayland?

I might be completely wrong about this though, so someone more knowledgeable
please explain. :-)

~~~
metageek
Yes, but it draws the decorations for other clients. The GP said that Wayland
clients draw their own decorations.

------
rick_2047
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

~~~
agentultra
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.

~~~
rick_2047
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)

~~~
jawee
I too love Puppy Linux! It works great on my netbook.. faster than any of even
the netbook-optimized distributions. I'm still running 4.3. The hardware
support was even perfect with the LuPu on my main laptop, but I'm holding off
as a lot of software packages I use are a pain... (openSUSE on this machine).

------
hasenj
This is great news for the Free Desktop.

Ubuntu is really setting itself apart as its own OS rather than just another
Linux distro.

It might take about two years for this whole thing to sort of stabilize
(Wayland + Unity), but when it does, Ubuntu will be kick-ass like it's never
been before.

I love it when people step outside the box.

~~~
nodata
Wayland was started by someone at Red Hat.

~~~
hasenj
It would be great to see Fedora using it too, but I don't know if that will
happen.

RHEL is not likely to use it, IMO, because it's not network-transparent. And f
RHEL won't use it, Fedora probably won't use it.

That said, what's setting Ubuntu apart is the fact they're moving away from
the traditional stack (X -> GNOME). This is significant enough IMO. Other
distros might follow, and in that case, there will be two kinda of distros:
those that use X, and those that use Wayland.

------
theclay
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.

~~~
cpach
I recommend Readability: <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

