

Wayland Preparing For 1.0 Stable Release - tux1968
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1MTQ

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microtherion
X is certainly overdue for replacement, and I can easily believe that the
price it paid for high cross platform portability has exceeded the benefits.

However, relying as much on Linux specific features as the article describes
strikes me as a step too far in the other direction. Are the benefits from
these kernel specific features really awesome enough to outweigh the benefits
of being portable to at least, say, the *BSDs, and maybe Mac OS X and Solaris?

Linux does not have a huge desktop presence. It has, of course, a huge cell
phone presence, but Android does not seem likely to adopt a new window system.

[Disclaimer: I work for a non-Linux Unix vendor]

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krig
It sounds to me like they wouldn't be against accepting patches that makes
Wayland work on other platforms, just that they aren't going to do that work
themselves. At least that's what I get from this quote,

> It's certainly possible to port Wayland to other operating systems, but
> they'll have to provide the same level of infrastructure as Linux does.

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asomiv
The way I read it is that they want other operating systems to adopt the same
infrastructure, e.g. kernel mode setting, instead of implementing an
abstraction layer in Wayland itself.

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kijin
Isn't it part of Wayland's philosophy to get rid of as many abstraction layers
as possible? X has too many of those.

But I guess they'll be forced to add some layers sooner or later. Having too
few of those can be just as bad as having too many.

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Tuna-Fish
> But I guess they'll be forced to add some layers sooner or later. Having too
> few of those can be just as bad as having too many.

The main thesis of Wayland is that they won't add abstraction layers. If you
want to support the Wayland protocol on another os without Linux facilities,
or if there is new hardware or changes in the drivers that don't fit the
Wayland model, Wayland will not expand to those needs, but instead a new
display server should be built to serve them.

Small projects to specifically fit the needs of the users, instead of one
large one that expands to serve all badly.

~~~
rat87
> Small projects to specifically fit the needs of the users, instead of one
> large one that expands to serve all badly.

For something at the bottom doesn't the opposite principal apply(not fully/all
bad but to a certain extent)? Isn't this why linux is popular for so many
embedded device instead of some proprietary embeded os for instance.

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fingerprinter
I cannot stand reading anything on Phoronix. The person who writes those
articles really, really grates me. It seems all finger pointy and blamey all
the time. I've not seen too much constructive or useful information come out
of that site in a long, long time.

And as for Wayland. I keep coming back to one thing for it...input. I don't
know if anyone is going to pick that up. Seems like the weakest bit of X and
someone will need to redo quite a bit of that work for Wayland and I remember
when X was struggling to get people to work on that...can Wayland get someone
to work on some of the most boring bits ever?

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viraptor
Maybe I'd care more about the language if this was just some random blog...
But these guys are a bit different. There's always some data and process
explanation behind each of their posts. They might not be great programmers
and OS contributors, but they're doing something really important anyway and
are doing it in a pretty transparent way. There were many situations where I
learned something from Phoronix or found a performance-related answer there.
They're also a bit different from other blogs in that they follow up on a
story. While others report "this is broken, whaaa!" and find a new topic the
next day, Phoronix will write up posts about ongoing progress to fix the thing
(typically).

For the effort they put into it, I can completely ignore the language they're
using. And if they blame a specific thing/group... as long as they're correct
- I don't mind :)

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tudorw
Can someone sum for me what Wayland is, I don't generally hang out under
rocks, but I feel like I do right now...

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stephen_g
It's a new display server protocol that uses EGL and a whole lot of the modern
parts of the Linux graphics system, while throwing away most of the old parts
nobody uses. The reference compositor Weston can be used either as a
replacement for Xorg, or run in Xorg. In it, you can even run a rootless Xorg
server so you can run native Wayland apps alongside X apps (a bit like Mac OS
X does).

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rufugee
Anyone know if wayland will support remote "clients" and local "servers" the
way X does today? What about xdmcp? Losing either would be quite disruptive
for me....

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tux1968
There is currently no network transparency (thus no xdmcp either) in Wayland.
Although the primary developer has left the possibility open that in the
future some remote display support could be added.

Of course it is something that could be shimmed into another part of the stack
by (NX, VNC, etc) as it has been on Windows for instance.

Until either of those happen, X will still happily coexist with Wayland.

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kzrdude
NX is far superior to X for remote apps, so clearing the way for a new
remoting protocol is good.

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trotsky
Has anyone tried running wayland as their desktop? With features like GTK+ and
clutter it looks like they're targeting gnome 3 - is it possible to get a
build of it up and running or is anyone providing a live cd?

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MatthewPhillips
You can only run demo apps with Wayland, neither Gnome nor KDE support it yet.

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kruhft
After watching the video, being able to rotate my windows N degrees as the
main showoff feature does not seem like a big selling point to me. Maybe I'm
old school, but sideways and upside down windows seems like a bit of a waste
of time to lose the stability, drivers and network transparency of a working
window system.

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wmf
Yeah, it can be hard to explain the value of Wayland given that it has similar
features as Xorg/Compiz but implemented without kludges.

I think Mike Paquette's classic post is relevant here (since Wayland is
_inspired_ by Quartz Compositor):
[http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid...](http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=6734612)
"There doesn't appear to be much code left from the original X server in the
drawing path or windowing machinery, and it doesn't appear that apps relying
on these extensions can work with any other X server. Just what did we gain
from this?"

