
Wayland (X11 replacement) 1.0 Officially Released - Garbage
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIxMzA
======
cleverjake
>> Wayland 1.0 doesn't mark the point that Wayland is complete and ready to
replace the X11 Server as there's still a lot of work left to do but it marks
the point at which there is API/protocol stability in terms of all future
releases being backwards-compatible with the Wayland 1.0 release.

~~~
kijin
Whoever wrote that abomination of a sentence needs to go back to school and
learn English again.

~~~
sneak
I conjecture that someone named Kristian Høgsberg (and perhaps his project
associates) may not be a native speaker of English.

Here on the intertubes, it's easy to condemn someone for poor usage, however,
remember that communicating complex ideas in a second (or sometimes third, or
fourth) language is not always the easiest thing to do. Not everyone grew up
soaking in it.

This is not an excuse for poor English - but is certainly a legitimate defense
against condescending fucktards such as yourself.

~~~
elwin
That sentence is from the Phoronix article, not Kristian's announcement, which
is quite fluent ([http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-
devel/2012-Oct...](http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-
devel/2012-October/005967.html)). Phoronix writing is always like that.

~~~
cookiecaper
Indeed. Phoronix survives only because Michael Larabel is basically the only
person willing to sift through the graphics mailing lists and provide
summaries. The writing is always atrocious and Larabel frequently makes
serious mistakes in his reporting. Every time there's a benchmark the forum is
filled with the same complaints; VSync, testing games that use different GL
versions between drivers, etc.

Michael has dedication but not much else. If someone was interested, there is
some real low-hanging fruit in that niche.

------
ChuckMcM
I'm hoping that Wayland will allow for faster direct rendering APIs. There
seems to be too much legacy X11 stuff for embedded systems to easily operate
in small memory situations.

~~~
JulianMorrison
X11 is fine on machines from the 1990s, with less power than a low end
smartphone.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well the counter example of that is the Raspberry Pi, it runs X11 poorly while
having more capacity and much more performance than the 486 and original
Pentium (which are '90's machines). I've been working with a 'Pandaboard'
which is an OMAP 4460 system, and its challenged too.

So perhaps we have a different definition of 'is fine.' :-) Have you run X11
on an RpI ? did you think that was fine?

~~~
pmarin
I have never seen a 486 running X11 at 1080p. Now days there are tons of
layers of crap on top of X11.

~~~
webreac
In 1992 (or 1993 ?), I had a 486DX33 with 16 Mb of memory and 120Mb HD running
linux 0.99pl12 at resolution 1152x900. It was very confortable, no problem for
compiling kernel while playing tetris.

------
Zenst
From what I know Wayland is only supported by Intel and AMD graphics drivers,
has this changed?

~~~
notatoad
It's supported by all the open source drivers, and AMD's proprietary, IIRC.
the only driver that doesn't support it is nvidia's proprietary one.

~~~
keithpeter
nvidia cards are quite common, so one hopes this major limitation can be
worked around. Perhaps we should get Torvalds to comment in his inimitable
style on the situation.

~~~
notatoad
Official torvalds comment, as requested: [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/06/linus-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2012/06/linus-torvalds-says-f-k-you-to-nvidia/)

(The workaround is to use the nouveau driver, which is fairly capable as long
as you're not trying to play 3D games)

~~~
coffeeaddicted
I wish Ubuntu (or other distributions) would give out numbers how many people
install the proprietary drivers. So many Linux guys seem to dismiss games and
3D (which is certainly also used for VR, architecture, 3D modeling,
simulations - and not just for games), so I'm somewhat curious how much it
matters on the Linux desktop. At least personally I know more people using
proprietary drivers on Linux than not using them, but I guess that's to be
expected for a 3D developer ;-)

For me the thought of losing nvidia driver support on Ubuntu is rather scary
given the current state of all other 3D drivers (and certainly other Distro's
might follow with Wayland). I hope the status of other drivers improves a lot
before that switch or 3D on Linux will be set back a lot.

~~~
gizmo686
Now that Steam is supporting Linux (and possibly making a Linux/steam box), I
suspect that they will be able to push for improved graphics drivers. In fact,
If I remember correctly, while working on optimizing some of their first ports
to Linux, they got Nvidia to improve some elements of the drivers.

Also, given the number of people using Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, my guess
would be that Ubuntu will not switch to Wayland until the compatibility issue
is solved.

------
pkmays
Wayland isn't going to replace X11, it's going to be an alternative to X11.

~~~
stephen_g
It's complicated. Wayland can replace some parts of X11 in Linux
distributions, but it relies on some other parts of X11 (like libxkbcommon).

I believe Wayland window managers [1] will replace most of X11 for most users
in a couple of years, but X11 will still be around to run legacy apps (similar
to the way you can run X11 applications in

I also think that Wayland will replace X11 in the way that most of the X11
developers will move to Wayland. X11 will still be around, and probably still
be supported by window managers for quite a while though.

1\. Wayland is actually the protocol/API, which window managers/compositors
and the applications that run in them will implement. The reference compositor
for the Wayland project is called Weston.

~~~
edhebert
I'm curious, is the naming related to the two neighboring towns in MA?

~~~
mercurial
_As Høgsberg drove through the tiny village of Wayland, Massachusetts, an idea
that had been germinating in his mind crystallized._ [1]

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-
li...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/the-linux-
graphics-stack-from-x-to-wayland/)

------
prodigal_erik
I find it strange to call it 1.0 while remoting is still on the todo list. The
age of vertical scaling, owning one big computer and sitting at its console,
is well into decline.

~~~
wtallis
Even with cloud computing, all the rendering and half of the other processing
is done client-side. Pushing pixels or low-level drawing commands over the
network is not the way technology is heading.

~~~
ch6530
The current trend in scientific computing is to put GPUs on the server and
push pixels to the client, e.g. [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-
it/software-switc...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/software-
switch-to-save-santos-25m/story-e6frgakx-1226057034041)

~~~
Sanddancer
For which they're using VNC, not X forwarding. There are a lot of ways to push
those pixels that don't involve X.

------
klrr
Omg! Can't wait to try it out, hopefully in a year or so we can completly
uninstall X from our systems.

~~~
jeltz
What is so wrong with X? I understand that it is a mess and the developers
have to work hard to add new features to it. But as a user of X I virtually
have no problems.

For the future Wayland might be the correct way forward but I do not see any
short term gain for the users.

~~~
padraigm
Some people complain about bloat and bad compositing performance under X, but
my real problem with X is that it's very insecure. Any program running on a
given X server can see any keyboard input to any other program running on the
same server by default. As it stands, there's not a practical solution to
this.

~~~
ygra
Qubes [1] maybe. But that may be a bit overkill as well.

[1] <http://qubes-os.org/Home.html>

~~~
padraigm
The Qubes project is interesting in some ways, but I think they're trying to
do too much in one go, and as a result the final product doesn't seem very
practical. For example, applications can't use hardware accelerated video
according to their FAQ [1].

So pardon me while I braindump...

It would be an interesting project to integrate an Android-style permissions
permissions system(possibly using SELinux) complete with per-application
virtual filesystems (using FUSE) into the system package manager. So, for
example, you install a music player, the package manager sets up a virtual
filesystem for it that lets the program see its own configuration directory
and your music directory, but nothing else. The package manager asks if you'd
like to allow network permissions to the music player (for downloading album
art or whatever); if yes, a firewall rule is added specifically allowing that
process to access the network, if not, none is.

One problem with that kind of system is that a lot of end-user desktop
programs are written with the assumption that the entire home directory is
fair game. I'm not convinced that's really necessary, though. In case a
program occasionally wants to access a file outside of its normal sandbox
(say, you just downloaded a podcast into your downloads directory and want to
play it with that music player I mentioned previously) you could always have
the supervising program ask the user if it's okay to temporarily add that file
to the program's sandbox. If it happens in an expected way (e.g. the user
clicks on a media file in the file manager) you could safely grant access to
the file without explicitly asking the user.

Something like that, on a distro using Wayland as the windowing system (to
avoid the gaping security holes in X), would provide 90% of the security that
Qubes does with significantly less inconvenience to the user. It would still
require a good deal of work for the package maintainers, but perhaps a distro
like that could implement something like the AUR [2] so users could do a lot
of the packaging work for peripheral packages.

[1] - <http://qubes-os.org/FAQ.html>

[2] - <https://aur.archlinux.org/>

~~~
dlitz
How do you think client-side window decorations impacts this? It seems to me
that it would be difficult or impossible to create a secure GUI if every
application gets such complete control over user interaction.

