

Wayland's X11 support is ready (An Experimental GNOME Shell Running On Wayland) - p4bl0
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4MzQ

======
ek
This is great news. Last August there was an article on Phoronix about KDE
hoping to migrate to Wayland for SC 4.9:

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wayla...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wayland_kde_2012&num=2)

Hopefully in 2-3 months, when SC 4.9 is slated for release, we'll have KDE on
Wayland. X is aging and is not very lightweight. Wayland brings some nice
innovations, like eliminating the need to switch between VTs to differentiate
X sessions.

The FAQ is also worth reading:

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

~~~
agwa
> Wayland brings some nice innovations, like eliminating the need to switch
> between VTs to differentiate X sessions.

Innovations like these (if not needing to switch VTs even counts as an
innovation) pale in comparison to innovations like network transparency, which
will be missing at first and eventually present but crippled in Wayland.

The ability to ssh to another system, launch a GUI app, and have it display on
the system you're SSHing from has always set Unix+X apart from Windows and Mac
OS. I can't believe this is being tossed aside so you can have cross-fades and
rotating cubes when switching between sessions.

It's true that network transparency will be possible with Wayland, but it will
be some sort of VNC-like pixel scraping approach, which has never worked as
well as native X forwarding. Network transparency will be a second-class
citizen in Wayland.

See
[http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2699657&cid=391...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2699657&cid=39198273)
for some more disturbing problems with Wayland.

~~~
moe
_The ability to ssh to another system, launch a GUI app, and have it display
on the system you're SSHing from_

When was the last time you've actually done that?

~~~
mcpherrinm
Twenty minutes ago. Here's a list of actual uses that I have personally done
in the last week.

I have large (64 core, 256 gigs of ram) servers in a university data center,
and a lab full of small atom machines.

I can run matlab without a gui, but still have graphs etc pop open when I need
one.

Yesterday I ran a remote Firefox on a machine in the same room so that I could
play sound on attached speakers, but still view the video locally, on my
laptop.

Sometimes I need to run expensive applications on a big machine, but from the
comfort of my home or office. X11 forwarding is pretty nice for that.

I run headless Linux VMs on my mac, and ssh to them, running them natively
displayed on my laptop. Sure, I could use whatever VMware gives me to display
apps, but X11 works better.

It's got plenty of valid use cases, and that's just ones for me.

~~~
moe
Sounds rather contrived to me...

Why do you need X11-apps from multiple(?!) local linux VMs on your desktop?

What GUI-app other than matlab do you need to run remotely?

~~~
burgerbrain
Why do you get to say that what he does is contrived? What makes your usage
patterns any less "contrived" than his?

~~~
moe
Well, why should I not say when it sounds contrived to me?

Exporting X11 windows from _multiple_ VMs on localhost? X11 forwarding Firefox
to access remote speakers? Seriously?

Yes, there are niche scenarios where nerds still use X11 for useful hacks like
that (myself included), but the discussion is about the future display
architecture for the proverbial linux desktop.

X11 has been a ball on a chain here for a really long time now. Use-cases such
as "too lazy to open a matlab pool" or "splice firefox audio" are not exactly
a convincing counterweight.

I'll gladly trade in my ability to run a remote gnuplot every once in a blue
moon for a desktop experience remotely comparable to OSX or Windows.

~~~
burgerbrain
Unless you are claiming that he is lying, I don't think that contrived means
what you think it means.

~~~
moe
Perhaps we have a different interpretation. I meant to say I find his use-
cases rather obscure because e.g. X11-forwarding a Firefox is not exactly my
idea of a sane answer to the question "how do I forward audio to remote
speakers?".

Bringing these examples up as scenarios that must be considered in the design
of the future linux display system seems... well, contrived to me.

~~~
metellus
His examples were _not_ contrived, they were actual examples of times that
mcpherrinm recently used X11 forwarding (unless you are claiming that he
lied). If you want to say that his use cases are obscure, strange, or niche
enough to not merit consideration, that's fine, but "contrived" doesn't mean
any of those things.

------
koeselitz
I wasn't familiar with Wayland; the Wikipedia article about it seems
remarkably good:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protoco...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_\(display_server_protocol\))

------
Symmetry
Interesting, but does Phoronix have some sort of editorial policy against
every linking to primary sources?

~~~
wmf
I think he's actually reporting live from the whatever summit, so there's not
much to link to. Generally Phoronix is much better than the mainstream tech
press about linking.

~~~
wolf550e
In my experice it is terrible at linking. They used to post commit messages
from git and changelogs from announcements in mailing lists as their own
original content without linking to the source. Without understanding the
meaning of many words in the text they were quoting without attribution. I
make a decision to never click on a link to phoronix after this happened a
number of times.

~~~
ajross
Yeah, I'm torn on Phoronix. They're a terribly SEO-me-harder experience in a
lot of ways (40% ad content on the page, nine-page articles, scraped junk
mixed in with the good stuff). That said, their authentic reporting
(especially on graphics stuff) is generally among the best available in open
source focused blogs. I read them.

~~~
sciurus
Phoronix is disappointing in many ways, but I have to give them some credit-
they're the only ones trawling the mailing lists and commit logs for linux
graphics news. If they had an RSS feed that only syndicated those stories, I
would read them.

