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Graphics Linux

LibreOffice Ported To Run On Wayland 216

An anonymous reader writes: LibreOffice has lost its X11 dependency on Linux and can now run smoothly under Wayland. LibreOffice has been ported to Wayland by adding GTK3 tool-kit support to the office suite over the past few months. LibreOffice on Wayland is now in good enough shape that the tracker bug has been closed and it should work as well as X11 except for a few remaining bugs. LibreOffice 5.0 will be released next month with this support and other changes outlined by the 5.0 release notes.
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LibreOffice Ported To Run On Wayland

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  • What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by amalcolm ( 1838434 ) on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @10:03AM (#50152635)
    What does Wayland solve for me, a standard Ubuntu user? What I have wordks ok, why does it need to change?
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 )

      Downsides: 1. you lose remote access (save for second-class stuff like VNC), 2. you need to port most software or use X emulation. Upsides: ... [crickets] ...

      • The majority of Linux users don't use or need the remote features of X. They want a responsive and consistent GUI. Dump all that legacy shit meant for the days of thicknet runs and AUI transceivers. We don't have framebuffers and fixed frequency monitors anymore either.

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by phantomfive ( 622387 )

          The majority of Linux users don't use or need the remote features of X

          Since most people don't use it, then just screw the people who do? Is that what you're saying? Hey, might as well burn the compiler too, and who really needs Samba? Get rid of all that nasty IPv6 code too, it's bloated and almost no one uses it.

          Saying "most people don't use it, so we can get rid of it" is moronic. You are the problem with the world.

          • How did you feel when Windows 7 x64 no longer ran 16 bit applications? Make the remote features into a module. Right now its slow and hobbled together with decades of legacy code.

        • The majority of Linux users don't use or need the remote features of X. They want a responsive and consistent GUI. Dump all that legacy shit meant for the days of thicknet runs and AUI transceivers. We don't have framebuffers and fixed frequency monitors anymore either.

          Then the "majority" can run the system of their choice.

          There are four major failings in your logic: you conflates users (at a keyboard and mouse, on a box they own) with instances of Linux; you overlook the reality of available choices by conflating a new choice with the removal of choices; you conflate the need for new with the necessity for everything old needing to be updated (plenty of 10+ year old software running in situations that don't need to change); you are ignorant of the nature of Open Source d

      • Downsides: 1. you lose remote access (save for second-class stuff like VNC), 2. you need to port most software or use X emulation. Upsides: ... [crickets] ...

        Performance, battery life, innovation.

        (And if you haven't noticed, X remote access is already second-class to thinks like RDP and SPICE.)

        • by Junta ( 36770 )

          Spice is pretty crappy (after really wanting to like it for a while). I hear rumor that RDP can be decent, but thus far I've not seen examples of it doing remote application access in a seamless way.

          My personal example of how seamless remote applications can work well is Xpra. Despite it's current marriage to X, the strategy used does not use the 'remote' capabilities of X and the concept translates directly to something like Wayland. It intercepts things at the compositor layer rather than remote X call

          • RDP can do seamless remote applications, but you have to have a Terminal Server to use it. It's not available, AFAICT, from the basic version.

      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        Upsides:

        You don't have to listen to gamerz whine anymore when an occasional CPU cycle is used for something other than rendering cartoon hookers in GTA.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by muep ( 901215 )

        Most Wayland-compatible applications would likely not render things by directly communicating with the Wayland protocol. Instead, they will likely use a higher-level UI toolkit. Toolkits like GTK+ and Qt are able to switch between Wayland and X11 based on which server they detect to be available. If you need to run a Wayland-compatible application from a server to which you are logged in via ssh, you would likely be able to do so as long as X11 compatibility is retained. As long as there is no convenient w

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Endymion ( 12816 )

          Did you miss the GTK+ 3.0 drama?

          The GNOME idiots have been making it a point to break compatibility and remove "old" (aka "working", "currently used") features. You are delusional if you think they will continue supporting X once they declare the Wayland version to be "standard".

          Of course, they'll probably use their typical victim-blaming approach where claim that keeping the old version around is "too much work" that should be done by someone else.

          • >"The GNOME idiots have been making it a point to break compatibility and remove "old" (aka "working", "currently used") features. You are delusional if you think they will continue supporting X once they declare the Wayland version to be "standard"."

            BINGO!!!! +1000

            And then other projects will marginalize their X ports too, perhaps LibreOffice, perhaps Firefox, who knows. But at some point there will be no way to continue to really run a full-blown X11 workstation, and that *SUCKS*. Because rest assur

      • by Junta ( 36770 )

        1. I suggest looking at Xpra. It's married to X, but is far better than X or NX at seamless remote applications. It's also an example of exactly the sort of remote experience that *could* be done within a Wayland context. The problem obviously being I had to point out something married to X as an example, rather than knowing off hand something that pulls off the same in Wayland, but the concepts are pretty sound.

      • Downsides: 1. you lose remote access (save for second-class stuff like VNC), 2. you need to port most software or use X emulation. Upsides: ... [crickets] ...

        I'm having trouble seeing why your post was marked troll. Funny, maybe. Insightful, more like it. Clearly not a troll. what on earth is going on with mods in this thread?

    • You had me at "Ubuntu". Cough, Mir.
    • It removed pesky features (such as remote display). Features like that ruin the simple appearance of pre-internet technology that is all the rage today.

      -- ok, I have heard that one of the Wayland developers did some sort of remote display testing but as far as I can tell you have to pull his personal git fork, build it yourself and you get no documentation if you want to try to use it.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      If you're a standard Ubuntu user you probably won't notice much, because it's the developers getting gray hairs from X. They work around all the shitty problems so it works for you, just like users felt IE6 worked fine.

      The main issue is how rendering is done on modern applications/desktops:
      1. The client draws everything into a bitmap using its own tools
      2. The client passes it via X to the compositor, which puts it together
      3. The compositor passes it via X to the hardware, which draws it

      So X does not do a wh

      • Lots of blocking calls

        Like what? the X protocol and the low level binding xcb are fully asynchronus.

        poor synchronization (tearing)

        I've heard the claim that Wayland will magically solve tearing. I only seem to get tearing when running two monitors (I've not seen single monitor tearing in years). Those two monitors are running at different frame rates, marginally. Your're either going to get tearing or awful juddering.

        support for multiple monitors and input devices with hotplugging

        Works fine for me...? I can

    • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      What does Wayland solve for me, a standard Ubuntu user? What I have wordks ok, why does it need to change?

      I hear LibreOffice has a spell checker.

    • by SEE ( 7681 )

      Have you ever been annoyed by users of *nix systems that are less popular than Linux? Then have no fear; Wayland is an effort to kill off those platforms.

      You see, first you reduce X on Linux to the sort of second-class status that it has on OS X. So then people switch their development for Linux to Wayland. So then they stop maintaining an X version of their app (even if the toolkit they're using supports both X and Wayland), since it costs them resources for such a tiny fragment of people. Then, since

      • Have you ever been annoyed by users of *nix systems that are less popular than Linux? Then have no fear; Wayland is an effort to kill off those platforms.

        blah blah blah

        And then all those people using *BSD or Solaris are up shit creek without a paddle.

        Short memories forget that Solaris used to have its own window system, and they switched to X windows due to popular demand at the time. No doubt they could switch again.

        And the vast majority of BSD systems are running the OSX window system, so a decline in X windows is not going to affect them much.

        instead of developing such a system for all *nix systems?

        Many linux features exist because they made their own versions of BSD features. BSD did not go out of their way to support them. Nobody is stopping the BSD people from writing their own. In fac

  • Yutani? I am sure they are in it together. And they know all about the aliens on LV426 - the bastards.

  • The post links twice to an offsite article that is hijacked by an overlay ad from which there is no escape, making the article unreadable. There is a hidden x on the ad overlay which only shows by scrolling, but clicking it only makes the x vanish, not the flash ad overlay. Reloading the article only reloads the problem. I'm running Pale Moon, a lightweight Firefox derivitive, on Linux.
  • You will still be able to run X windows apps on your wayland desktop: fire up an X server, just like you would do on OSX or Windows.

    • Sure you can run X apps on Wayland.. For now...

      Then distros will suddenly standardize on Wayland. Soon after X versions of applications will not be available. Then.. bye bye remote display. Were you still using that? If so then you are just a neck beard who is afraid of change and was holding up progress so that some poor kid's video game ran a couple of FPS slower. Your features don't matter but the gamer's needs do matter. I guess that makes sense seeing that video games are the only life many of those s

      • Soon after X versions of applications will not be available. Then.. bye bye remote display.

        Really? So X windows is going to disappear entirely because linux decides to improve its display technology?

        And it's going to take RDP and VNC with it? And what about the native wayland remote display protocol? All going away? No more remote displays???

    • You will still be able to run X windows apps on your wayland desktop: fire up an X server, just like you would do on OSX or Windows.

      Yeah and running X11 apps on Wayland will be just as shit an experience as it is on OSX and Windows too. It's been a while, but last time I tried, copy/paste was limited to text, drag and drop didn't work, keymapping didn't work properly and a whole host of other issues.

      Oh and the X11 window manager wouldn't manage native windows. So either you use the crappy native WM, or have

      • You say you want X windows for its ability to run applications remotely.

        copy/paste was limited to text, drag and drop didn't work, keymapping didn't work properly and a whole host of other issues.

        This is the present reality when you try to do this, so things are not getting any worse if you are running remote apps.

        So either you use the crappy native WM

        I have no problems with the OSX window manager, it works fine for me.

        • This is the present reality when you try to do this, so things are not getting any worse if you are running remote apps.

          That's outright untruthful. Copy/paste/DnD works via the x protocol, and as such is completely network transparent. If you disagree, prove it by quoting chapter and verse of the ICCCM or the XDND spec.

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