Wayland/Weston Gets Forked As Northfield/Norwood 252
An anonymous reader writes "Weeks after Canonical announced Mir, Wayland's display server protocol and Weston compositor have been forked. A contributor to Wayland found differing views with the project over desktop eye candy and other technical decisions to the X11 successor, which resulted in forming the Northfield and Norwood projects. The developer, Scott Moreau, has been outted from the project but has provided a lengthy explanation why the fork was needed to advance the Linux desktop."
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:3, Informative)
The guys developing Wayland are the core developers of X11.
Re:While the emerging display servers fight it out (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:1, Informative)
The guys developing Wayland are core developers of _some parts_ of X11. Truth to be told, real Wayland commiters (e.g. Kristian, Pekka) aren't X developers. Others, like Daniel are mostly talking instead committing.
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:3, Informative)
wierd since Kristian wrote AIGLX and DRI2 which are X. Scott is that you?
Re:Why was he banned? (Score:1, Informative)
--- Day changed Tue Mar 12 2013 ...
12:28 I DONT GIVE A SHIT what you ignorant people think about attitude, politics and a bunch of crap that doesn't even matter
12:32 soreau: FYI, not giving a shit about people is exactly your problem.
12:32 Darxus: You're a fucking idiot
Also:
http://www.chaosreigns.com/wayland/soreau.html
Just a couple nice, recent examples.
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:4, Informative)
Blob drivers getting you down? Vmware and Nvidia both solved that problem. Redhat and Ubuntu made it even easier.
It's really not the problem some people like to make it out to be.
BLOBS really only become a problem for companies that don't actually want to support Linux. They throw together a kernel specific binary and that's all you hear from them.
With dkms there's really no excuse at all for that anymore.
The kind of vendor that would give you a single kernel BLOB driver is probably a vendor you don't want to use with Windows either. Some stuff is just crap. Some companies are just crap.
You are going to get some crap in a free market regardless of how much you pander to hardware vendors.
Re:Explanation (Score:3, Informative)
X is fine locally. It's even more suitable as a gaming platform than Windows and that's probably the best metric for deciding how suitable a local display is.
Remotely, X still manages to hold it's own despite being ancient.
With a few tweaks, X can even kind of keep up with RDP.
The real proof comes when you compare X to MacOS. This is a disaster that you have really experience for yourself to fully appreciate. I think far too many people take all of the pro-Apple propaganda at face value.
Remote MacOS is a disaster and that's the approach the Wayland idiots want to take.
Linux applications don't look like "hammered shit".
That's just mindless Lemming trolling.
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:0, Informative)
This was a lost cause over 6 years ago. Hell the KDE & gnome camps have been having the same bitch fest for years and at the end of the day...they both suck now. UI for unix based systems that is not Mac is dead...as much as I loved X11 at one point. It's not worth the pain and hassle to figure out which of the 58 ways you can do the same thing.
Re:Explanation (Score:4, Informative)
The main deficiencies I see with X for remote access are:
1. Applications that insist on client side rendering (maybe some X issue is leading to that, but Chromium is a real pain over a remote connection).
2. It doesn't perform well unless you layer something like NX on top of it. The wire protocol is too chatty or low-level.
3. It needs some kind of middle layer so that you can move applications between displays, and displays between consoles. Think something like screen or tmux. Once you launch an app on a display, it is stuck there.
Wayland obviously isn't going to help with any of this as it currently stands.
Re:More information (Score:4, Informative)
Optimise the common case' has been wisdom in the *nix world from before we were born. In the case of X, what was the common case when it was designed is not the common case now, and X does not optimise that common case.
X does a fine job of bringing up a bunch of windows, distributing events and providing both direct and indirect hardware access.
Also, optimize the common case is not the same as trash old stuff and remove features for something not demonstrably better.
That common case is local display, using graphics hardware which is built around 3D and OpenGL.
Nope. The common case is still largly a bunch of 2D windows.
I don't do all that much 3D, not that it matters...
What the display subsystem needs to do is to efficiently make available the display hardware capabilities of the machine it is running on, in a way that is easy for people to program.
Certainly.
Then there is the question of what a modern desktop environment needs and how to efficiently deliver that.
I suppose you could say the goal is to build a quality desktop environment, yes.
The design assumptions of X, and the need to work around things using extensions and suchlike, make things harder than they need to be.
Seriously, what is this fetish with extensions that you people have. They are not "workaronuds" they are new API calls. Eveyr system on the planet introduces new API calls when the time comes for it. What is this bizarre double standard holding up X to be something magically pure which isn't allowed new API calls without them being "hacks" or "workarounds".
If you want your 'evidence', take a look at the size of code and execution time required to do basic and complex tasks using X vs similar situations on Mac and Windows.
This is the same X that allows direct rendering, giving programs very direct and efficient access to the hardware and often runs games a few FPS faster than the Windows version of the same game? (Is OSX even in the running here?)
That X? The one that's already better than the two systems you are proposing are better?
Unless you're running a compositor, then X almost completely gets out of the way. If you are compositing, then it almost completely gets out of the way.
For 3D graphics... but a desktop is much more than just 3D graphics output.