Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland in Quantal Quetzal 230
jones_supa writes "While there's still more than one month until the Ubuntu 12.10 feature freeze, Ubuntu developers continue to work towards their tight schedule of having Wayland serve as the compositor for the Quantal Quetzal release due out in October. Canonical's intends to provide smooth transitions from boot to shutdown. Wayland is also used for session switching and other operations, avoiding traditional VT switching, providing a consistent monitor layout, using the greeter as the lock screen, ensuring that locked sessions are actually secure from displaying, and showing the greeter while the session loads. Phoronix remains skeptical about Ubuntu making the deadline."
wayland is a bad choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu is sparking a new 'unix war', dividing the linux ecosystem. It first pushed hard for its own Unity now with Wayland that breaks all current X apps. Theyr'e only in it for themselves.
Without X we will lose network transparency among many other great features. Let's not even mention the lack of gpu support to say the least.
Re:wayland is a bad choice (Score:3, Insightful)
X will function as an add-on to wayland,
Yes, but this breaks the current seamless integration of remote and local apps that we have today. Presently, this works even for OpenGL based applications (although obviously slower over a network - but they run).
Seamless remote/local app integration is a cornerstone of Unix-based systems going back to at least the 1980's. Breaking this is unacceptable.
Re:wayland is a bad choice (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't currently have seamless integration of remote and local apps. For example, there is no audio or freedesktop.org notifications for remote applications. I personally use xpra to get this seamless integration. Even though the name has "x" in it is not fundamentally tied to X protocols and will probably be easy to port to wayland. The data transmitted over network is compressed bitmap.
Re:End of network display? (Score:3, Insightful)
Today, no non-X app is network transparent. Tomorrow, no non-X app will be network transparent.
If nothing is changing, how can something break?
Idiot.
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:2, Insightful)
Can't blame you, Ubuntu just can't stop jumping sharks...if only they could have stuck to being a normal fucking desktop distro, not only would Ubuntu be much more popular, but desktop Linux would be as well. When they moved the window control buttons to the left they had already gone off the deep end.
Re:simple question about Wayland (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:5, Insightful)
X11 needs to be replaced? Like my roof needs to be replaced because it works and have no holes in it? But it is old, I think about 15 years, so yeah it needs to be replaced.
X11 is old, but it works. I can have multiple monitors just fine, 3D effects are working fast, games are working. Also, it is supported by all hardware vendors like AMD, Nvidia, Intel. Also I have network transparency with no additional costs. Multi-User works just fine with very easy Ctrl+Alt+F1 up to F12. I don't know why you want something else. In KDE there is also a user switcher GUI way. Boot is smooth in Fedora 14, 15 and 16.
As long as there are no drivers from AMD, NVidia and Intel, Wayland will be a wet dream of a few developers. I do not need to go back to the time where the only graphics mode was Framebuffer. My impression is from the Ubuntu developers that they like some kids who are just pushing things like they want without any though about anything. Just to be different or "cool".
First the totally unnecessary changes in Gnome with the Close/Minimize buttons; then the not usable Unity; and now the Wayland, which will be usable only after more 5 years in development and testing.
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:5, Insightful)
X11 is more like a roof that was originally a 40-foot timber yacht. You've turned it upside down and fixed it to the tops of the walls. Gradually, over the years, you've patched in the holes until it only leaks when the wind is in the West. You've figured out how to get a flue up through the thing. You've nailed a TV antenna to it, and sealed around the cable with silicone. When you put it there you never bothered to take the decks out, so it's almost impossible to get into and work on and the structural elements, optimised rather for the sea than for housing, make it not very useful for storage. You still have to repaint it with pretty expensive paint every five years or so, else it starts to rot, and for some reason it attracts lots of confused-looking seagulls.
Anyway, look at all the features! It's got a winged keel, a 200hp diesel engine, and a gorgeous timber and brass wheel. All the fittings are marine-grade stainless, the rigging was all almost brand-new when you installed the thing and in her day she'd do 27kt reaching across a good wind. Don't actually use much of that any more, of course, but still...
Technically the keel still violates local planning ordinance, and technically it still smells quite a bit of fish. But it's been there for 15 years and it works. There's no need to replace it.
What's that love? You want to build an extension? Ah.
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not get rid of it and halve the size of the display server code base, making it much easier to program against in the process?
Can you do this without sacrificing functionality? If so, do it. If not, you're writing Wayland.
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:4, Insightful)
Wayland apps are like Mac apps. They have no native remote desktop capability. You have to use a 3rd party hack like VNC to get such a feature.
I've seen how VNC runs on a Mac. Not impressed.
Running X on a Mac won't let me run iTunes across the network. The same is true of Windows.
Re:I have long dreamt of the day (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an awful lot of hyperbole in one post with no actual information.
The thing that would be best would be X12, not scrapping X11 completely. There's lots of good and useful things in X, which Wayland doesn't have.
Oh, and by the way, please, if you want OSX or Android, you know where to buy them so go and do so. Stop trying to turn my very nice desktop system into an inferior commercial alternative.
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to *nix. You must be new here.
I rather like that the window manager, greeter, and locker are separate processes. I can replace them. I can mix and match according to my taste. I could even write my own if I wanted. This is the Unix way.
Example: you probably use some ubuntu-y, gnomey, kde kind of bullshit. That's fine for you but I have different tastes. So I use xdm to log in, wmaker to manage windows, and xscreensaver to lock my screen. Result: my X11 install is several hundred megabytes smaller than yours. But if I want your setup it's just a small apt-get away. This diversity, choice, and flexibility are why I like the *nix desktop in the first place.
But if I read you correctly, you want it to be all 1 big monolithic process? What is it, you're concerned about context switches between these processes on today's hardware? What the hell planet are you from? The X design has worked well for decades on much less powerful hardware than I have in my pocket today. X works fine on all of my devices, just like it did in the 90s, just like it does on my Nokia N900 running at 600mhz. I will be sticking with X for the time being.
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:4, Insightful)
But Ubuntu is for home users, how many home users are running remote desktops?
How many home users are using the command line? Why don't we rip that out too?
You've got all this stuff that frankly isn't need for the ones the OS is being pushed for, and which makes them system more brittle
What evidence is there that network transparency causes X to be "brittle"?
see the classic rant from thom at OSNews about how X crashed when doing simple tasks for a loooong list of people having trouble with it in the home user space
Sounds like a driver problem, not an X problem. He has a point in that X should be able to handle driver problems more gracefully, but I don't see what this has to do with network transparency. Can't we have both network transparency, server side window decorations, and robustness against driver faults?
why not simply let X be for servers and Wayland be for home users? Choice is good, right?
Fragmentation is bad for choice. If I want to use a certain app, I have to use the display platform that app is written for. And there is no bright line between server software and home software, so anyone who isn't an average user(and on average, almost everyone is not average) is going to be locked out of using some software.