ENIGMA Forums

General fluff => Off-Topic => Topic started by: luiscubal on November 05, 2010, 09:25:28 am

Title: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: luiscubal on November 05, 2010, 09:25:28 am
The FOSS guys finally discovered that X11 sucks so bad, so they're finally starting to develop a replacement.
So eventually X11 will only be a backwards compatibility layer, like it is on Mac right now.

Awesome.
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: Josh @ Dreamland on November 05, 2010, 09:36:53 am
That explains why X.org finally fixed that Java bug. Or someone did.
People tend to work better under threat of discontinuation.
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: Game_boy on November 05, 2010, 10:50:27 am
The hype in the FOSS world is always about replacing everything with something new and shiny from the ground up. But X11/X.Org has a 20-year history! Even if the new thing is clean and efficient, by the time you add back all the features from X it will be a) as messy as the X Server now and b) take 10 years to code and stabilise.

X's real problem is that it doesn't have enough knowledgeable fulltime developers for the size of the codebase and it needs better release management and clear goals. If it had that it could be as well-run as the Linux kernel and all the shininess could be achieved by incremental change.

Look at Gallium3D, XInput2, XKB2, DRI2, the new ATI, Intel and Nvidia open drivers generally and all of the other work going on. They're all fine, just progressing slowly and when integrated and tested will finally make X a modern display server and windowing system. It just looks a mess because the last few years have been a transition time into those projects coinciding with a move to open drivers for all three major graphics vendors.

If Linux software was made compatible with those drivers and vice versa then 90% of the graphics complaints by users would go away. It's not a problem fundamental to X's design, it's that developers TARGET the proprietary closed AMD and Nvidia drivers for some inane reason then complain they're black boxes. Well of course they are and everything to do with them is a hack (e.g. Wine).

/rant

So I wish the Wayland developers would say "How could we improve X instead?" or at least write code which could be integrated into X in the long run, rather than duplication of effort in an already understaffed development area.
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: luiscubal on November 05, 2010, 12:59:33 pm
X11 sucks. It's one of the single worst parts of Linux desktop.
20-year history is 20-year legacy. Wayland won't have all X11 has. Stuff from X11 nobody uses, such as the rendering APIs, won't exist. For rendering, everybody already just uses Cairo, OpenGL, etc. so wayland won't expose any further APIs.
Wayland also uses kernel features when available instead of reinventing the wheel.

Also, Wayland doesn't reimplement the drivers. ATI and Intel drivers (supposedly) already work just fine in Wayland.

Google it. There are several articles around explaining the problems X11 has that Wayland is trying to solve.

Personally, I've hated X11 for some years already, so I'm glad it's going down.  Too bad it's so late, but better late than never.
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: Game_boy on November 05, 2010, 01:06:46 pm
If Ubuntu genuinely does replace X with Wayland next year like they say, and nothing breaks, then I'm all for it. But to me it sounds like that effort would be better spent fixing X and deprecating the APIs you talked about.

What people want is a desktop that plays HD video and modern 3D games without issues on all current AMD, Nvidia and Intel hardware. However that's achieved I don't care, but the past history of 'ground-up FOSS rewrites' is not encouraging to me. You could take the same route with something like Firefox or the Linux kernel and I don't believe it would work.
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: IsmAvatar on November 05, 2010, 03:35:41 pm
(http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/0/06/Icame.jpg)

On the other hand, I guess this gives us a chance to rewrite some of ENIGMA's Linux windowing code so it doesn't use X anymore.
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: Josh @ Dreamland on November 05, 2010, 09:39:54 pm
I'm usually in favor of preserving, though my public track record doesn't suggest it. (In all honesty, there's no hope for GM, and there was no hope for even the better aspects of R3's instance system and parser sync.)

X has been, recently, much better about not crashing and dying all the damn time. The sheer motivation they must have attained in seeing that the project would otherwise be replaced probably got them going again on the errors. Look at Pidgin. Empathy replaces Pidgin; next thing you know, pidgin has voice and video support.

I haven't seen X's code, so I can't speak for whether or not it should be scrapped. I trust a group of GNUs to make the right choice.

But if they totally fuck up the API and still don't offer widgets natively, I'm going to flip shit.
(Nah, I'm actually pretty much over it at this point.)
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: luiscubal on November 06, 2010, 06:42:24 am
They won't offer widgets natively.
They leave that part to GTK+ and Qt.
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: RetroX on November 06, 2010, 10:01:48 am
Native widgets should be used.  It really should be standardised. :V
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: Rusky on November 06, 2010, 05:37:57 pm
The widget system is the layer above Wayland/X11. It's definitely nice to standardize them, but it's nicer to make sure things are modular so that if somebody standardizes on a sucky window system like GTK+ they can be switched out without dropping everything.
Title: Re: Wayland (aka DIE X11 DIE)
Post by: serprex on November 23, 2010, 08:57:00 am
ssh -X