
Wayland - Beyond X - wisesage5001
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Wayland-Beyond-X-1432046.html
======
krakensden
I'm a little nervous about client-side window decorations. One of the nice
things about window-system controlled decorations is that updates in function,
policy and style can be done unilaterally. I'm worried that few years after
the Wayland transition there will be a cluster of ugly legacy apps that will
never be upgraded and don't work right- think xmms, not Google Chrome.

~~~
gue5t
I'm apprehensive about the same things. Toolkit cooperation on Linux is bad
enough now and I see no indication that any work is being done to even
mitigate worsening as these changes give toolkits more control over user
experience.

Google Chrome is just as bad if not worse than xmms because it's so loved; I'm
a firm believer that user interface improvements should be shared between
programs rather than implemented as one-off exceptions to the system setup. If
it's a real improvement I'm bound to want it elsewhere, and if not, the loss
of consistency isn't worth the small gain for that particular application.

~~~
thristian
Google Chrome is much better than xmms because you can turn the client-side
window decoration and custom colour schemes _off_.

Still not as attractive as Firefox, to my mind, but that's opinions for you.

~~~
exDM69
> Google Chrome is much better than xmms because you can turn the client-side
> window decoration and custom colour schemes off.

How? I didn't know this was possible and tried it (after some googling).
Basically I have two choices: bad and worse. The default has the tabs on top.
If I enable "hide system title bar", it _adds_ a frame with close, minimize,
maximize buttons.

I use a window manager with no decorations, just 1px border around active
window. I'd like to get rid of the Chromium custom ugly tab bar.

~~~
krakensden
I don't get it- if you have "hide system title bar" off, there's just tabs,
and then your window manager takes over and draws a 1px border. Do you want
chromium to enable some mode where it /never/ has tabs, and /always/ spawns
new windows? Or do you just want a different theme for the tab bar?

~~~
exDM69
I'd like to get rid of all the remaining visible UI widgets in Chromium. That
would be the address bar and the tab bar. Web page with 1 px border, no
decorations or buttons, that's what I want.

I still want my tabs inside the browser (my wm doesn't have tabs for every
window like ion3 or kde kwin). However, I don't want the tab bar to be visible
unless I'm in the process of changing tabs with ctrl-tab. Same goes for the
address bar, I'd like to see it only when I'm typing to it.

I used a browser called Luakit for a while. It's a WebKit-based browser that
has a user interface that's built with Lua and has a Vim-like default setup.
It worked quite well but I changed back to a conventional browser when I
couldn't get a proxy set up with good ad blocking, etc (luakit has no proxy or
ad blocking, it relies on you installing polipo+privoxy or another http proxy
setup).

So these days I use Chromium but I would love to get that minimal UI look and
feel from luakit.

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gioele
Maybe it is me misunderstanding things, but Wayland and X11 are not
technologies in contrast with each other.

Wayland is a glorified and up-to-date framebuffer and input system, X11 is a
library that draws shapes and is responsible for delivering input from the
user to the correct application.

I think the current situation is confusing because current X11 implementations
not only do what X11 is meant to do, but they also need a way to push pixels
to the framebuffer and listen to keystrokes. Basically X servers needed their
own way to talk to the graphic card and they implemented it (decades ago).
That part is almost completely independent from the protocol that draws shapes
and routes input to applications. What Wayland is replacing is _that_ part,
the part that deals with the framebuffer (that in the modern times is no
longer a simple strip of memory region with RGB pixel data).

In the end we will have Wayland as the only owner of the graphic device and
many clients, one of which will be the X server. When they say "client-side
decoration" they are referring to the status quo: the Wayland client called
X11 will draw the decorations (asking the WM to do that); nothing different
from what we have now.

Once Wayland will be stable there will be other direct clients that will want
to bypass X11: games probably, but also other multi-platform toolkit like Qt.
And X12, eventually ;)

To me Wayland looks as the perfect example of how to move forward: make older
unsustainable technologies coexist with newer technologies.

~~~
wmf
A key point is that X11 is no longer used for drawing; in recent years people
are moving to client-side drawing (usually with Cairo). Thus the subset of X11
features that people use is similar to Wayland's features.

When people talk about client-side (really the toolkit) decoration, that's in
the native Wayland case, so it is different from the way it's done today.

------
pwg
Single page version for those who would prefer to read one large page instead
of three split up pages:

[http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Wayland-
Beyond-X-14320...](http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Wayland-
Beyond-X-1432046.html?view=print)

------
currywurst
I felt that the words like 'legacy' and 'dated' were a tad overused, and the
article felt biased. A particular example was how X's protocols were described
as "complex, asynchronous", contrasted with Wayland's "violently asynchronous"
protocols !

It's always thrilling to have a blank slate, and you have a euphoric feeling
that _this_ time, we're going to get it right. But there are the essential
complexities of any problem, and I would say that for the end user, X has
delivered in spades. It will be interesting to hear developers reactions to a
battle-tested Wayland code base 5 years from now.

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rwmj
I went to a talk about Wayland at FOSDEM. What was most interesting was that
_everything they are trying to solve has already been solved by X_.
Furthermore, the only possible benefit of Wayland (rotating windows in non 90
degree amounts) is basically a bug, not a feature.

Then there's the lack of network support.

If this is pushed on Linux users, expect forking of distributions.

~~~
pilif
This goes to show that it's practically impossible to do it right. At one
point there are the purists who complain about bloat. At the other point,
there are the purists complaining about NIH when you try to remove the bloat.

You can't have it both in this case it seems.

As a user I know one thing: X11 is _huge_ and while it has all the nice
features, it's also _still_ a slow and laggy beast. This might be caused by
bad drivers, or it might be caused by a bad architecture (or bad drivers
caused by bad architecture making it impossibly hard to write good drivers).

As such, I'm curious to see whether a restart based on technology newer than
the 80ies might solve the two big issues I'm having with Unix GUI at this
point.

If it does, I'm happy.

If it doesn't, I'll be on the lookout for a better solution.

But I know one thing: If a long-year X11 developer (Kristian Høgsberg is
working on the xorg x server) tells us that our issues are practically
impossible to fix without a rewrite using a different architecture, then I
believe them. Why?

Because for them it would likely be much less work to fix the existing thing
(especially if it is nearly 30 years old and as such should be very mature and
bug-free), so if they prefer a rewrite, there must be some truth to that.

Personally, I don't care about either bloat (unless said bloat leads to other
issues than me having to buy a bit more RAM and diskspace) or NIH, but I still
to this day haven't found a Linux distribution that has a GUI which works as-
well as OSX or Windows (window drawing issues, multi monitor support - heck -
just changing resolutions at times), so I'm certainly open to see other paths
explored.

~~~
rwmj
I simply don't have this problem of X being slow or laggy, so I cannot comment
on the rest.

(Edit: I use XFCE, not GNOME)

~~~
danieldk
I use both OS X and Ubuntu. In comparison, Ubuntu is terribly slow, even on
basic things such as dragging and resizing windows, let alone graphically-
intense applications. This is both with ATI's proprietary drivers and the
opensource radeon driver. Things are a bit better if I don't use a compositing
window manager.

I am not sure who is to blame, X or the drivers. But most users won't care.
They'll see that GNU/Linux has a bad desktop experience, and revert to
whatever they were using.

~~~
rwmj
I'm using Intel hardware on a large display, and of course Intel makes all the
information available to driver writers and the X drivers are open source and
very high quality. And there is no lag. I used to use Mac OS X before and
there's no difference.

So this sample of two users seems to indicate that your problem is with
drivers. Wayland will make no difference to your experience of Ubuntu.

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garyrichardson
One of my hats is 'system administrator'. I like X a lot more than VNC/RDP. I
don't run linux on my desktop and don't really care about performance there.

I'm not looking forward to the day when X is gone. Being able to fire up
system-config-* on a remote system is awesome.

~~~
reuser
My impression is that Wayland planned to support X as a compatibility option.
The difference is that X isn't the low level mediator of all input/graphics by
default. As I understand.

<http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html>

~~~
throwaway64
this is fine, up until the point applications no longer support X11

~~~
Hemospectrum
I can imagine this being a real issue if it happens at the toolkit level; for
example, GTK dropping X11 support. But until Wayland proves itself _in the
field_ as a real and superior competitor to X, it's absurd to suggest that
even a significant proportion of distros would abandon X altogether. And as
long as _any_ distro of note (Linux or otherwise) still ships with X, it seems
really unlikely that the major toolkits would indulge in such madness.

I wouldn't worry about it for another decade or so.

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Tsagadai
It's nice that there is still interesting development work being done in this
field. This approach certainly seems like a step forward. Kernel Mode Setting
is noticeably faster and has better power saving abilities than previous
approaches but is cannot be fully taken advantage of by X.

There is an experimental port to Arch if anyone want to give it a spin
(<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland>).

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arka
The real problem, and confusion in this discussion is because X11 is a loaded
concept and when people talk about Wayland they dont seem to understand what
part of X11 wayland is supposed to replace.

X11 meanings:

\- X11 protocol: Allows remote applications.

\- X11 server: Controlling applications and redirect input and such.

\- X11 drivers: Controlling hadware.

As i understand it, Wayland is supposed to replace X11 drivers and parts of
X11 server. Apparently you can still use the X11 protocol on top of Wayland if
you want.

Theres a good FAQ about it: <http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html>

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Symmetry
While many of the changes that Wayland is making seem like improvements, I
would really miss server side window decoration if it were to go away. Perhaps
a nice way forward would be to have, instead of X on Wayland, another lighter
weight server between Wayland and the applications? I suppose this would be
very analogous to current window managers.

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bwarp
I get the feeling this will go the way of Plan 9 i.e. its only flaw is that it
was trying to replace something very entrenched that was "good enough".

I really like Wayland and would like to see it succeed though.

~~~
pilif
I really have a feeling that X11 is beyond "good enough". Embedded systems
wanting to use Linux have mostly had to do their own solution (Android, qtopia
before that) because X11 was to heavy.

Changing Screen resolutions on the fly (think: "projector being connected")
still is a lottery, mutli-monitor support usually requires a lot of manual
intervention, bad drivers still can cause X11 to crash and take everything
else with it, there are still graphical glitches when the system is busy.

For years - heck - decades, Linux distributions have tried to make this work,
but I think that we are now at a point where everybody agrees that it can't be
fixed within the framework of X11.

So the question is: "is clunky behavior good enough? Is being forced to use
completely different technology on mobile devices (= less code sharing) good
enough?"

While the answer was yes 5 years ago, it's not longer true and that's why I'd
give Wayland more chances now.

~~~
bwarp
Good argument, one which I support completely.

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lomegor
Really good article. I've had so many problems with X... we can only hope.

~~~
bratsche
Get ready to have so many problems with Wayland in 5.. 4.. 3.. 2..

