4 ms·

Ok, some corrections first. Wayland is a protocol, not an implementation. Xorg is an implementation of a protocol, not the protocol itself. Weston is the refer

Ok, some corrections first. Wayland is a protocol, not an implementation. Xorg is an implementation of a protocol, not the protocol itself. Weston is the reference implementation of Wayland, but it is not the only one - KDE's KWin is another. Xorg is the current most common implementation of the X11 protocol, however - again - it is not the only one (although almost all Linux desktop systems today use it) and there are other implementations. So how do X11 and Wayland relate to each other? Well, they are both protocols for providing a windowing system. They each do things differently, with pros and cons to each approach. They are different enough so that one can be implemented on top of the other, so compatibility should not be a problem, although obviously features are lost or crippled when doing so. There is this misconception that Wayland obsoletes X11, but they are very different systems designed by different people and worked by (mostly) different developers that only superficially provide the same features (showing windows on screen) that - at least personally - i do not see that happenning any time soon, if ever. Personally the way i see it is similar to asking if Atom (or VSCode, if that is your poison) obsoletes Emacs (or Vim).

shmerl 9y ago
Weston and KWin are Wayland compositors. Wayland should obsolete X11 (it's not a misconception, it's one of the primary goals), but it's a humongous task, especially from applications side. And Wayland is not yet feature complete to replace all common use cases. For example it's still lacking standard protocol for screen recording and screenshots, that fits its security model.
- hollerith 9y ago
  Also, there are no guarantees that any mainstream browser will ever use the Wayland protocol directly without going through an X compatibility layer like XWayland. And XWayland consists of most or all of the X11 code base. Yes, Firefox and Chrome are open source, but they're atypical of open source projects in that (a) the amount of implementation effort required to make the kind of changes under discussion here are much larger than for typical open-source projects and (b) institutional users and knowledgeable (or simply well-advised) individual users of Firefox and Chrome won't use your fork unless you have a credible story about how you can protect them from 0days. I know of no fork of either Firefox or Chrome that has ever had a credible story, but I've spent only a couple of hours looking. Google has their own replacement for X11 which they use in some Chromebooks, which reduces the probability that they'll throw in behind Wayland. Not every OS install needs a mainstream browser (in-vehicle entertainment systems do not seem to: they're heavy users of Wayland) but if your OS install does, and you're waiting for Wayland (more precisely, software that uses the Wayland protocol) to replace xorg or X11, you might be waiting a long time. "mainstream": provides a decent experience on most popular web sites including e-commerce sites.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS? If not, it's pretty bad and just another rift like their SurfaceFlinger on Android. I'm also waiting for Firefox to start supporting Wayland without X11, but it's progressing really slowly. Besides browsers another very major work is required for Wine. It's not even moving anywhere now, since developers aren't sure how to address it. They are too dependent on X11 for windows placements and etc. So XWayland will need to be adequate, to address these cases, including gaming, until the time major projects will complete all that work.
    - hollerith 9y ago
      >Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS? Not the last I heard (579 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996545
    - kllrnohj 9y ago
      > Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS? If not, it's pretty bad and just another rift like their SurfaceFlinger on Android. Except SurfaceFlinger predates Wayland by years. Kinda hard to use something that doesn't exist. ;) At the time the complaint was that Android didn't use X11 but I think it's safe to say that was a good decision at the time. As for merging them at this point they both have too much inertia combined with some fundamental design differences that'd be hard to reconcile.
      - shmerl 9y ago
        Their main failure wasn't just the fact that they didn't collaborate with Wayland (which wasn't a lot later by the way), but the fact that they didn't want to work on big problem that benefits Linux as a whole (replacing X11), but made something that benefits only them, and that created a huge and damaging rift. That they can be blamed for. In contrast, Nokia didn't want to make such rift, and until it went bust, used common graphics stack (with SailfishOS becoming Meego descendant, using Wayland).
        9y ago
- justinjlynn 9y ago
  I'll also miss my XMonad...
- badsectoracula 9y ago
  > it's not a misconception, it's one of the primary goals That is what Wayland's developers want, but that doesn't mean it will happen :-P

shmerl 9y ago

Weston and KWin are Wayland compositors. Wayland should obsolete X11 (it's not a misconception, it's one of the primary goals), but it's a humongous task, especially from applications side. And Wayland is not yet feature complete to replace all common use cases. For example it's still lacking standard protocol for screen recording and screenshots, that fits its security model.

hollerith 9y ago
Also, there are no guarantees that any mainstream browser will ever use the Wayland protocol directly without going through an X compatibility layer like XWayland. And XWayland consists of most or all of the X11 code base. Yes, Firefox and Chrome are open source, but they're atypical of open source projects in that (a) the amount of implementation effort required to make the kind of changes under discussion here are much larger than for typical open-source projects and (b) institutional users and knowledgeable (or simply well-advised) individual users of Firefox and Chrome won't use your fork unless you have a credible story about how you can protect them from 0days. I know of no fork of either Firefox or Chrome that has ever had a credible story, but I've spent only a couple of hours looking. Google has their own replacement for X11 which they use in some Chromebooks, which reduces the probability that they'll throw in behind Wayland. Not every OS install needs a mainstream browser (in-vehicle entertainment systems do not seem to: they're heavy users of Wayland) but if your OS install does, and you're waiting for Wayland (more precisely, software that uses the Wayland protocol) to replace xorg or X11, you might be waiting a long time. "mainstream": provides a decent experience on most popular web sites including e-commerce sites.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS? If not, it's pretty bad and just another rift like their SurfaceFlinger on Android. I'm also waiting for Firefox to start supporting Wayland without X11, but it's progressing really slowly. Besides browsers another very major work is required for Wine. It's not even moving anywhere now, since developers aren't sure how to address it. They are too dependent on X11 for windows placements and etc. So XWayland will need to be adequate, to address these cases, including gaming, until the time major projects will complete all that work.
  - hollerith 9y ago
    >Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS? Not the last I heard (579 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10996545
  - kllrnohj 9y ago
    > Aren't Google using Wayland in ChromeOS? If not, it's pretty bad and just another rift like their SurfaceFlinger on Android. Except SurfaceFlinger predates Wayland by years. Kinda hard to use something that doesn't exist. ;) At the time the complaint was that Android didn't use X11 but I think it's safe to say that was a good decision at the time. As for merging them at this point they both have too much inertia combined with some fundamental design differences that'd be hard to reconcile.
    - shmerl 9y ago
      Their main failure wasn't just the fact that they didn't collaborate with Wayland (which wasn't a lot later by the way), but the fact that they didn't want to work on big problem that benefits Linux as a whole (replacing X11), but made something that benefits only them, and that created a huge and damaging rift. That they can be blamed for. In contrast, Nokia didn't want to make such rift, and until it went bust, used common graphics stack (with SailfishOS becoming Meego descendant, using Wayland).
      - 9y ago
justinjlynn 9y ago
I'll also miss my XMonad...
badsectoracula 9y ago
> it's not a misconception, it's one of the primary goals That is what Wayland's developers want, but that doesn't mean it will happen :-P