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."
Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:2, Interesting)
>> Will applications need to be rewritten or modified to work on Wayland? Yes. (From TFA.)
As a developer, I'm about to get off the Ubuntu train. Every major release recently has required tweaking the UI (e.g., tray icon behavior changes). I'm not really looking forward to another migration, especially when there are Red Hat and SUSE users (who tend to buy more) who are looking for things too.
Unsurprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there anyone who still thinks the Ubuntu release team prioritizes either usability or low number of bugs now? That's a serious question; I have no idea why this is considered a novel or even notable thing at this point. New Ubuntu release, leading edge software that's not ready for prime time is included, the release is at best beta quality software by any reasonable standard. Same story in every release going back to at least the 8.04 PulseAudio debacle.
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:5, Interesting)
Although the more detailed answer is that GTK/Qt apps will need recompiling with an updated library. If you use X11 directly, then you have more work - except that you can also run an X server within Wayland to support native X11 clients.
I've been impressed for some time with how well the Wayland developers have thought about backwards compatibility. X11 needs replacing; complaining that its different to X11 doesn't help solve the problems.
End of network display? (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be sad.
But beyond that: there's one big deficiency of current X applications--if the X server dies, so do all graphical programs.
That's quite surprising when you think about it.
After all the graphical programs are X clients. Why would a client up and die just because some server died?
Does your browser die when a webserver dies?
And please, no pretending that X on Linux doesn't crash. It does, and this is the 4th time I've restarted this laptop today. Hanging hard with VirtualBox.
To sum: If the graphics server crashes, I'd like to see it automatically restart with Upstart, and then the clients automatically reconnect.
Re:I have long dreamt of the day (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no comment on 'wayland good' versus 'wayland bad', but it is certainly a known quantity and it has been waiting in the wings to replace X for a while.
As you said, the dream of replacing X has been around for a very long time. No one has done it because it is a ton of work and because the changes are bound to piss off some developers and users (see "pound sand" post above).
I'm impressed that the Ubuntu folks are going to take this on and I wish them well. If they succeed then the rest of the distro's will probably follow suite.
Re:wayland is a bad choice (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
VDPAU? They don't mention it, so I assume its going bye bye. Its kind of funny in that everything I use X for is everything Wayland opposes.
Just this weekend I was ssh -X into my mythtv backend to run the config program to add another capture card running X over the network, so my binary only nvidia cards using VDPAU have more to look at. I never use stupid animations and other 3-d foolishness on my desktop because I'm unimpressed; its the 2010's version of the 1980's demand that all desktop publishing projects must use a minimum of 50 different ugly fonts to show off that you can do it. I prefer my content to be my primary interest, not my window animations. Of course all of that is impossible over wayland. Thanks guys for exactly what I don't need! Maybe you could make it eink and touch screen only, just to annoy me further?
Re:End of network display? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope. You're the idiot.
Today all of our apps are network transparent.
Tomorrow they will all be recompiled for Wayland and not be network transparent anymore.
You idiots trying to re-invent the Mac should actually use one sometime.
Re:Ubuntu to developers: "pound sand" (Score:5, Interesting)
From the FAQ: "The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process."
The Wayland window manager will be built in. If you want to change your window manager, you have to change the display system itself.
Particularly egregious is the choice to have Wayland clients provide window decorations. That means that no matter what window manager you have compiled into Wayland, you can't centrally control the appearance of your desktop.
What happens if I want to use a Wayland distribution that provides a tiling window manager, but my apps are coded with window decorations? What happens if I want to use Fluxbox's built in window tabbing, but none of the clients support that?
Re:wayland is a bad choice (Score:4, Interesting)
I think GP's point is that RDP remoting architecture (which is perfectly doable on Weyland) is better than X11 model.