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."
Just what we need... (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, a diverse marketplace of ideas is never beneficial.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather take one solid piece of software than 10 which are broken in different ways.
I believe this distribution [microsoft.com] is what you're looking for.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather take one solid piece of software than 10 which are broken in different ways.
I believe this distribution [microsoft.com] is what you're looking for.
he said solid not unstable or unusable
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Funny)
In fact, find a dr. Sues book
What is that, a book on the benefits of malpractice insurance?
Re: (Score:3)
Umm, how is a display server and compositing window manager a flavor of Linux?
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
If an ordinary application can't be written once to look fine on both, then really it is a new flavor. If the application writer doesn't have to know or care, then it's not.
This fork happened over the difficulty in adding candy to the UI, so in theory all the apps that aren't the shell shouldn't care, but in practice, well, time will tell.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's interesting how many people are interested in the desktop.
I just care about MY desktop instead. I prefer to edit some configs (which clearly is rocket science) and experiencing some inconsistent look and feel among applications, than using MS or Apple solutions and submit to whatever their management think is a good idea to stick on MY desktop to make their system more difficult to migrate from.
People want to replace xorg (a fork itself)? best wishes, not a problem for me. Problems would arise when xorg replacements are used to introduce incompatibilities, push one distro ahead of the others, render old software/hardware obsolete. It's not easy to pull such stunts by staying free as in GPL, though.
Re: (Score:2)
It's interesting how many people are interested in the desktop.
I just care about MY desktop instead. I prefer to edit some configs (which clearly is rocket science) and experiencing some inconsistent look and feel among applications, than using MS or Apple solutions and submit to whatever their management think is a good idea to stick on MY desktop to make their system more difficult to migrate from.
Using open source desktops you are also at the mercy of upstream. Forking a desktop and maintaining updates is just too time-consuming for an individual. If upstream abandons your favorite desktop (e.g. old versions of GNOME1 and KDE3), you are pretty much screwed, because your system will become outdated and incompatible with everyone else who is moving on.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:4, Interesting)
...yet oddly enough I am still using GNOME2 despite everyone's best attempts to kill it.
A fork needs to be popular to be relevant. Otherwise it is just noise. The same is true of distributions. Few people are aware of them all or even how many there are. Most are highly specialized or have no following to speak of.
So effectively the level of diversity you have to consider yourself is far less than what some Usenet troll might want you to think.
The same is true of display servers. These projects have to gain momentum, developers, and users. Mass revolts may undermine that.
Then there's infighting of course...
I have to confess. I am feeling a big mountain of shadenfreude right now...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The primary commit history for the past year... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the desktop on Linux is truly approaching it's demise.
Actually I think the desktop's only future is on Linux.
Most of the regular users are moving on to tablets and phones. Even in businesses I'm starting to see people migrate to just a tablet. There's still plenty of desktop users but at the rate we're going desktop computers will be a thing of the past within the decade.
I'd wager that geeks and Linux types will be the only ones who still want a desktop OS and system by 2020. We'll probably be running on off the wall hobbyist hardware (Raspberry Pi type devices) and hooking up to mostly HD televisions as monitors if purpose built monitors aren't still available.
I'm not complaining - I'll be keeping mine too as even as a technophile I still prefer to sit down to a full system rather than use a tablet, but I truly think that there will eventually be a "year of Linux on the desktop" - it'll just be after most of the world has forgotten about the desktop.
Re: (Score:2)
Or tablets and phones will take on more and more desktop-like features.
When I envisage the future, its having my phone scale up to run something like my current desktop now when connected to bigger monitors/keyboard/mouse. This is not "phone interface on the desktop" as its being interpreted by MS with Metro (and other notable offenders) - it's a device presenting the appropriate UI for the appropriate context. Not mashing one idea until it vaguely suits another.
Re: (Score:2)
There is always going to be a need to pack as much power as possible into a workstation for CAD, 3d graphics and other specialty applications. This means a form-factor that can dissipate more heat then a tablet can.
On the flip side, on the very low end, administrators are going to want machines that are essentially tied down to the desk for places like call centers or data processing. For one the mouse/monitor/keyboard paradigm works very well here, but also workstations are much less 'personal'.
The point b
Re:Just what we need... (Score:5, Insightful)
Often it takes someone to branch out and start something to jumpstart development so that other people see what's been done and think it's worth contributing to. Unless someone makes that jump, we'd never know what might have been.
Re: (Score:2)
Survival of the Fittest (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd never do it myself, but I'm looking forward to seeing which projects survive and how they change the landscape in five years. X11 was difficult to use for years... let's see what a little competition can do for innovation and usability.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The guys developing Wayland are the core developers of X11.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
wierd since Kristian wrote AIGLX and DRI2 which are X. Scott is that you?
Re: (Score:3)
Agreed. Open Source was never meant to be a top-down heiarchy. Its history will tell you that. Some of RMS' rants speak volumes about how Open Source, like life, tends to break out and do its own thing. I'm all for competition in this category. The major distros will adopt one or the other, or both! The two projects may merge (un-fork?) and become stronger than either could alone. In the meantime, we have Xorg and it works well enough.
So let the strongest triumph over the weaker project. We could ha
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Instead of working together to resolve their differences and taking the best technical ideas from both groups to enhance the core product, they have a whiny bitch fest, split the development teams, create two products which end up lesser than the original, create an artificial need for more developers, reduce the advancement of the state of the art, and cause people new to the area to spend twice as long researching which products they should use.
In the end, society loses.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, "survival of the fittest" is generally wasteful in terms of development resources. The results are, however, usually the most fit. Think of this as capitalism vs carefully government controlled economy, and how capitalism is us
You have only worked on trivial problems (Score:5, Insightful)
There comes a point where there is no readily identifiable "best" strategy. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in either direction. Perhaps one persons says, "the rule of thumb that holds for the common case, doesn't apply here." Perhaps there are valid differences about what goal to optimize for -- it is a law of the universe that you can't optimize in all directions at once.
At some point the only way to decide the issue one way is to fork the code and see what becomes popular. As an outsider, you don't really have a good perspective on whether this is justifiable. Clearly the magic code factory has stopped for the moment, but coding efforts are probably stalled more often than not. I started on a new project a few weeks ago, and I don't expect to be doing anything but refactoring and bug fixes for several weeks to come. And if I decided that it was just as much trouble to start over with a bare set of classes and do things the way I think they should have been done the first time, are you going to call me out on it? Is there any better proof of the viability of that strategy but in the execution? Perhaps this will be a better performing or more feature-ful product, and perhaps not, but if the only thing learned from the experience is that "doing it this way turned out to be a bad idea," that still counts as a win in my book.
A failure is something you don't learn anything from.
Lastly, as counterproductive as a fork may be, it's nowhere near as hard to merge changes as it would be if the guy had just started a whole new project. Which is the biggest reason to cry foul over Canonical's development efforts.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that there is something to be said for more choices being better. But there comes a point when there are too many choices. For instance, when KDE was the only game in town (aside from the CLI), there was certainly a dearth of choices. But today, where you have KDE, GNOME, LXDE, XFCE, Razor-qt, Enlightenment, Windowmaker and what have you, somewhere, distros ought to draw a line and offer a sane number of choices.
Similarly, on the windowing system, I think it would have been better had people tr
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Most of these splits tend to be over unresolvable issues. They are an indication that a project has hit a dead end. In the end, society wins when such projects die, and this is how they die.
I expect we will be using x11 for a long time to come.
Re: (Score:2)
Look.. the web is filled with dead projects. Most of which have never been forked. The fact that a project is forked is not statistically or empirically linked to failed projects. Whether or not a project survives or fails is mainly determined by the project lead's desire to make it happen. If anything has an influence on how a project get's on, I would say it is more about user base and the amount of people willing to help it/use it, that gives devs the drive to work on.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a liberalist view (J.S. Mill), which completely misses the goal.
The succeeding projects adhere to principles and existing conditions (what liberalism would call restrictions on freedom) while those who do not are not a valuable contribution to anyone.
What you are saying is correct, just not the way you might (?) think.
Sorry, reading a lot of Mill these days, so it may not have been what you alluded to.
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:4, Insightful)
blasphemy! if you're going to use a game analogy, make sure you use the right game. shao-khan will collect your geek card and then enslave your soul.
Re: (Score:2)
We could have a Street Fighter style "Finish Him" video to hail the end of the lesser.
Umm... don't you mean Mortal Kombat?
Re: (Score:3)
X11 has never been difficult to use. The drivers have often been incomplete or unavailabne which made things hard to use for particular hardware, but this would have been a problem with no matter what window system, the driver situation would have been the same. Nearly all problems people have had are driver relelated and that has nothing to do with x11 itself but rather the lack of driver support for major hardware vendors. The driver issues have nothing to do with x11 itself so its improper to blame x11 f
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: (Score:2)
Some of the distros are hostile, but some even come with a way to bring in the vendors drivers that is transparent to the user. For everyone else you just download and install them in a similar way to usin
Nobody Likes Binary Blobs (Score:2)
Most of the hostility is coming from people outside of linux - eg. RMS. If he had been in charge of linux there would be no binary blobs allowed (part of at least a draft of GPL3 was designed to stop such things), but he has not contributed code to the Linux kernel because that's not one of his projects.
Are you serious? Binary Blobs are an unpleasant compromise, and Nvidia is the last (okay, there are binary blobs all over the place). In retrospect has that compromise helped or hindered Linux adoption....that I think is hard to call, but it has slowed the development of open source drivers, its also delayed the release of OS updates; been an insecure part of kernel with security vulnerabilities lasting years (unheard of in the rest of the kernel); had unfixable bugs; delayed more progressive technologies b
Re: (Score:2)
If software patents die or the ex-SGI people at Nivida that remember the patent troll court case that SGI was hit with retire that source code will probably be opened up within a couple of weeks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
X11 may be difficult to program and maintain if you are a developer.
It hasn't actualy been difficult to USE for a rather long time.
More information (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody involved with the wayland project is happy to see weston (the reference display server) get forked to be developed into a more usable desktop environment. That's basically what it's for, and this is far from the first (ubuntu forked it, ADWC was another fork).
This entire article argued he couldn't do what he needs with a plugin alone, which is not relevant to his problem with the wayland community. The problem was his refusal to use the existing mechanism to retain protocol compatibility by copying the existing protocol code into a new extension and modifying in there: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-March/008172.html
In four pages, he didn't address why he didn't feel like doing that.
Re:More information (Score:4, Funny)
nothing he said in there was anything worse than what linus posts, or many open source projects. you could have said "scott - i choose not to make the changes that you'd like. you're free to fork things". instead, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth - claiming that you were being accommodating and then stonewalling him, kicking him when he called you on it, and pretending that he's a bad egg for forking things
if you're going to bad-mouth someone for forking, then you're just playing politics
Re:More information (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of Wayland, and I could be wrong on this one, is to avoid the mistakes of X. From your solution, we just go back to the days of hack around the core.
The core protocol is flawed and the project shouldn't be afraid to make some sort of shift when there is a pretty good reason for that change. If dude was purposing change for just change sake, yeah I would get it. But the protocol doesn't implement basic window management within the core, and makes it insanely difficult at the plugin level. I, for one, think dude has a point.
That is exactly what happened to X. Everyone was afraid of changing the core protocol, afraid that it would break older stuff. Look where that got it. About a bazillion extensions. At some point backwards compatibility breaks the baker and I know that is hearsay in the OSS community. I know there has been a lot of boneheaded change for change sake forks, but I really don't see this as falling into that category.
Re: (Score:3)
Nobody is asking him to keep it out of the core forever. Just making his modifications in an extension so they can be cleanly added to the core (or his extension can become the core), instead of breaking things as he changes it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:More information (Score:5, Insightful)
The core protocol is flawed
Bullshit!
The core protocol is very very good.
There are a fewnow obsoloete bits like the bitmap graphics and fonts, but the rest of the core is fundementally sound.
So, unless you can provide some evidence that the protocol is flawed, then go back under your rock.
Oh yeah and Keith Packard: quotes don't count. He might be a core X11 developer but he's also a one man FUD machine, which is really sad.
About a bazillion extensions.
So? Let me repeat that, so?
The protocol is *designed* for extensions. Extensions are simply the X equivalent of adding more API calls.
Look at Linux: it is a POSIX kernel, but with LOADS of extensions! Does anyone whine "oe woe posix is flawed linux has so many extensions it's fundementally broken lets nuke it stard from scratch and by the way no one needs multi user right?"?
Seriously, who the fuck cares if they're "extensions" or "core", any more that if I care if the networking zero copy super low latency fast stuff is an extension or in the core POSIX system call interface? A clue: no one cares.
No one cares on Windows either! Turns out that Windows 8 implements all those Win32 calls right back to the Win32S (a Windows 3.X era thing) API. Do you hear anyone complaining that because Windows has some old API calls in it that it is fundementally flawed and the mere existence of old APIs taints it? No, because that would be stupid.
Likewise: you know OSX used to allow you to run OS9 and earlier binaries! My got it supports old stuff!! It must be fundementally flawed! Oh my god! Every system supports some degree of backwards compatibility!! They are ALL FLAWED! We must rewrite them all in javascript on the cloud in HTML5 except that all the browsers can render HTML 3.1 so they are flawed too!!!
Here's what astonishes me: people hate X so much that they complain (a) when it's too old and (b) when the developers add API calls to make it more up to date!
Actually, I'm in favour of updating the core protocol, or adding some hefty extensions to reduce latency NX style---though XCB actually is a fair improvement over xlib---but Wayhand is not the answer to that because it removes basically everything.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
This. a thousand times!
Sacking network transparency for the sake of having animated window transition effects is, what's a fundamentally flawed design.
Re: (Score:2)
'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.
That common case is local display, using graphics hardware which is built around 3D and OpenGL.
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.
Then there is
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.
I have movies on my mind.. (Score:2)
Standards (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, XKCD: making cartoons of memes that have existed for 30 years. How unoriginal.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
-- Andrew Tanenbaum
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, XKCD: making cartoons of memes that have existed for 30 years. How unoriginal.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
-- Andrew Tanenbaum
Not really- the XKCD cartoon accepted and stated the "there are too many 'standards'" premise as its *setup*. The point it was making was regarding unilateral attempts to *solve* this problem and their unintended consequences.
FWIW, this may have something to say about open source. However, in the commercial world the problem is as much that various parties have a vested interest in ensuring that *their* solution is the "universal" one accepted. This applies even if there's already a more widely-accepted o
"Advance the Linux desktop..." (Score:5, Insightful)
"Advance." You keep saying that. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What is needed, before "advancing" anything, is to advance acceptance of the Linux desktop, and IMHO this ain't helping.
Re: (Score:3)
To advance acceptance we need to provide features that people want, and marketing to show people can get those features. See Ubuntu.
There is no way in heck Debian was going to advance acceptance of linux on desktops due to certain design decisions that make Debian Debian.
In some cases the forks really do help.
Re: (Score:2)
Why? The good thing about the Internet and open source is that projects with 0.01 % market share or less can have viable communities and be useful to many people. Desktop Linux is a lot bigger than that, and it's doing its job for millions of people around the world
Re: (Score:2)
What is needed, before "advancing" anything, is to advance acceptance of the Linux desktop, and IMHO this ain't helping.
That's only true if you care more about acceptance of the Linux desktop than about its functionality. If you work for a company like Canonical that is likely the case. If you get paid the same whether the whole world uses Linux or only the development community uses it, then it probably isn't the case.
People scratch their OWN itches when developing FOSS. That's why there will never be one true linux distro. Sure, the users of that distro would benefit from all the concentrated free labor, but people are
Re: (Score:2)
What I have to say about touchscreen devices: these people are walking into stores saying "I'd like to trade in my desktop with its 20" screen, fullsize keyboard, mouse, surround sound, for a weak, puny device with a 4" screen and an on screen chiclet keyboard". That is sheer insanity. Touschscreens portables are a niche market, desktops are for people who do real work. Even a laptop is not equivalent to a desktop in ergonomics and comfort.
While the emerging display servers fight it out... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:While the emerging display servers fight it out (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
X11 isn't so bad. The current server is messy and some code and parts of the protocol should be deprecated. But these projects are all trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and that's why they are all likely doomed to fail..
Re: (Score:3)
X11 isn't so bad. The current server is messy and some code and parts of the protocol should be deprecated. But these projects are all trying to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and that's why they are all likely doomed to fail..
X11 is very messy in places. There's some critical issues in there that need to be fixed soon (notably the use of 16 bit values in the protocol level for window sizes and locations). The ICCCM has a lot of wreckage of earlier protocols in it that are just totally in need of being scrapped. Taking a broom to X11 to give it a thorough clean (with selected bits of incompatibility) would be a tremendous thing.
But the compositing stuff that has the Wayland people worked up? Totally not an issue to me as a GUI to
Explanation (Score:5, Funny)
Once Wayland components developers started trying to implement something practical, they discover, one by one, that they need those "unnecessary" X features after all, however there is no way to explain it to the rest of developers, who still believe that removing everything they don't immediately use in their narrow area is a great design practice.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
+1
It's obvious to anyone looking from the outside in.
They should've just went for X11R8, or X12. That is, just fix the real problems. And reset the clock on best practices by discarding the libraries and interfaces that everybody could agree needed to go.
Unix has it's problems, too. Plan9 proved that there was a much better way to do things. Most new features on Linux are half-assed because of the need to maintain some semblance of backwards compatibility. For example, namespaces---Plan9 executed namespaces
Re: (Score:2)
No need for X11R8. Just a protocol extension using the extension mechanism that was built in particularly for the purpose of extending X for these reasons.
Re: (Score:3)
Many of these comments are really off from what I have seen having an in depth knowledge of X and Linux programming. It seems like many just say things without knowing what they are talking about. There are no useless libraries or interfaces in the X standard. You could use the core X graphics primatives to develop an application. Though, there are newer ones that do more. The old ones need to be there for backwards compatability, but the do not get in the way of addign new features. The 2D X graphics primi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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 di
Re: (Score:2)
For the many to one and one to many situations instead of just the one to one thing of mirroring a desktop or single window it exceeds RDP.
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: (Score:2)
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.
The one thing that is always painful with remote access is when you're shipping large and complex bitmaps back and forth, and that's simply because it is when you are critically dependent on the bandwidth and latency. With very complex application-level rendering, you simply don't get good performance when you've not got the app on the same system as the display (avoiding "client" and "server" terms); when they're both local, you've got additional options that provide much higher performance (e.g., shared m
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed on just about everything.
I'm not sure that separating the display from the client has to be so difficult. You really just need a way to save/restore state. You don't even need to do it constantly - I appreciate that if you're doing 3D graphics you want to just send the drawing commands to the GPU and never put the framebuffer into system RAM. You just need a way to detach a client which causes the middle layer to start queuing events, the display to dump back its state to the middle layer, and the
Re: (Score:3)
The truly ironic thing is when such comments are spewed out in defence of a 1970s style dumb framebuffer constucted with a single user non-networked MSDOS mindset that was backwards thinking even when MSDOS was first written as a cut down single user clone of CP/M.
I don't see this single user, single machine framebuffer approach as a step forward. It's fine for full screen video games but hi
Next Woburn/Billerica (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Next Woburn/Billerica (Score:4, Funny)
I'm waiting for the Wayland/Yutani fork myself.
Re: (Score:2)
Good luck to them at actually producing stuff but they do piss me off with all the "X sux" stuff before they can show better results in even rigged demos.
Re: (Score:2)
Allston/Brighton as well
I don't know.
In theory, being able to render good cheap food and live music sounds great. But it will attract way too many hipsters.
I hope there will be fewer headlines about Wayland because I live there and always click before remembering.
Another fork? (Score:3)
Yet another fork of display technology projects for FOSS?
Are they trying to solve the problem by parallelizing the problem: break it into lots of little pieces and work simultaneously on them to arrive at a solution sooner?
Or is this a case of egos, where "those guys don't know anything I'll start anew and do it right"?
What matters is delivered stable technology. It doesn't have to be perfect or massively extendable: just stable, performant and delivered.
Re: (Score:2)
This is part of the natural development process of any project of sufficient size. There is the old way (X), which some think is all that anybody needs, the project to replace it (Wayland), and then people who think some mistakes are being made, which results in forks. Same can happen i n corporate world behind closed doors too, even forking when parts of organization do not agree and one level higher management doesn't/can't stop it.
In open source world, it is all in the open and there's nobody to stop it,
Northfield + Weston (Score:4, Funny)
Shouldn't someone create a couple more forks with names like Eastcoast and Southwood so we can have all the cardinal directions covered? Then we can have programmer gang wars.
Someone Forgets History (Score:2)
One of the things that went wrong with X was that we tried to pull too much of the OS into X so that we could run on every old platform out there. Or to put it more bluntly, bending over backwards for fringe platforms
He seems to forget that Linux was once a "fringe platform". Sigh.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/interview/kristian-hogsberg [fosdem.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Outted? (Score:2)
I think you mean ousted.
What I want (Score:3)
Go ahead and make all the forks you want.
But here's what I'd like to see:
-The ability to always be able to switch away from an errant application. That imples ...
-Not allowing apps to hog all input without an exit key (Alt+Tab or whatever).
-Keep a kill switch (XKill).
-The ability to restart the X (or whatever) system without killing all apps. Why can't the apps keep running and allow you to restart the graphics system (if required)?
-That implies keeping (or allowing) Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart the graphics system.
-Easy and fast network desktop access, if desired. This isn't just for people working at National Laboratories, but also just for accessing Grandma's computer and so forth.
Splitters! (Score:2)
The Wayland People's Front will never stand for this! The People's Front of Wayland are just wannabes. Not to mention the Campaign for a Free Wayland.
Love,
Loretta (formerly Stan).
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:2)
That's an excellent question.
Re:When are they going to use motion sensing and 3 (Score:5, Funny)
It's about time the entire desktop go 3d. It's 2013 and video cards can do it easily. Instead of windows why not just use rotating cubes?
You can easily do that without some fancy display driver or even 3d glasses. Just strap together 6 monitors into a cube shape and fashion a suitable base that will let it rotate in 3 axes (probably best to put the CPU inside the cube so you only need to provide power to the cube). Then to change desktops just flip the cube in the appropriate direction.
Gnome 3 is EDUCATED STUPID! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You bought a Media Access Control? How much did it cost?
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't be surprised if they replace the kernel next ...
It's been done. I know of at least two distros that offer the FreeBSD kernel instead of Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Hookers and blow... obviously
Re: (Score:2)
Even commercial software has the same problem, though the bigger products do tend to become a single entity simply because no-one else has the resource to work on it.
eg. look at Microsoft's data access technologies - ADO, RDO, ODBC, Jet, DAO, OLEDB, LINQ2SQL, EF3, EF4.
Then look at commercial companies - you want a DB, you can have Oracle, SqlServer, DB2, just to name the 3 most popular.
The "trouble" with FOSS is that there are enough people who want different things and can modify what exists rather than wo
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The folks behind Wayland and the like do have some valid points. The way people use X has changed drastically in the years since X11. Generally that's been for the better, sometimes for the worse, but there's certainly no denying the difference: there are entire subsystems in X that no one uses anymore. We should be using X12 to make a clean break with that.
Nothing was really wrong with the protocol. If we're going to be swapping image buffers around from now on, I'd prefer something more along the lines of
Re: (Score:2)
X11 FOREVER!!! !!! !!!
... he says after suggesting we probably need X12