20 ms·

Ubuntu To Ditch X Server For Wayland

369 points by dkd903 16y ago

guest 16y ago
I have a worry of this turning out very badly.
- mahmud 16y ago
  Wayland uses OpenGL ES for rendering, preparing Ubuntu for handsets. Ubuntu must be eying a future alongside Android, which is an excellent bet. There have been many attempts at X replacement, all well justified, and if Wayland is the best of them, it would still be better than the baroque X protocol. Like almost every C++ programmer working in the early 00s, I too hacked on Berlin :-|
  - guest 16y ago
    The idea of Wayland growing and becoming a more usable platform sound terrific. The troubling part about this is ubuntu's history of doing what's good for ubuntu.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
      - mg74 16y ago
        Ubuntu Unity is a desktop shell replacement and has nothing to do with the Unity game development platform. Or was this a joke and I just wooshed it?
        mahmud 16y ago
        Nope, not a joke. I am really that stupid.
      - almost 16y ago
        I dont think the Unity shell and Unity game platform are in any way related. Am i wrong? EDIT: Sorry, I thought I was the only one pointing out the error but looks like I formed part of a mob. Anyway, it's an easy mistake to make, you can hardly be blamed for not following every little detail of Ubuntu and the things that run on it :)
        mahmud 16y ago
        I have already admitted to my error elsewhere, but just for the sake of intellectual honesty .. I do think Unity3D is somewhat of an under-appreciated technology.
      - akent 16y ago
        I think you're confusing http://unity3d.com/ http://unity3d.com/ with https://launchpad.net/unity https://launchpad.net/unity. Unity desktop is GPL3 / LGPL3.
        mahmud 16y ago
        Please upvote this guy while you egg me on the face. BLOODY HELL! What a relief! But can you blame me given the name and purpose proximity? :-/
      - weego 16y ago
        Either I'm confused or you are: I was under the impression that when they talk about Unity they mean a replacement shell for Gnome and not the web plugin. Or is this a different conversation?
    - lhnn 16y ago
      Why is it troubling for a company or organization to do what's in their best interest? Ubuntu's goals do not seem to be nefarious, and almost everything they're pushing for the community is open-source, except Ubuntu One and the Software Center ability to purchase apps.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    This seems less ambitious than Berlin in a lot of ways. One big difference is that Berlin aimed for network transparency (like X, but ideally done even better), while Wayland is local-only. That might simplify enough things to make it more likely to succeed. For me personally, now that nx makes X's network transparency actually usable, I'm not in a big hurry to go back to a non-network-transparent windowing system with a screenscraper like VNC layered on top. But I could see that not mattering for a lot of users, so it's probably the right choice.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      This seems less ambitious than Berlin in a lot of ways. Worse is better, and whoever ships a working prototype is best. Sacrificing network transparency for local performance should be a no-brainer, given the use-cases.
      - FooBarWidget 16y ago
        The bottleneck in X has never been network transparency. Local access has been accelerated through Unix domain sockets and shared memory for as long as I can remember. It looks like Wayland also has a client/server architecture which makes me suspect it's can be made network transparent just like X is.
        loewenskind 16y ago
        It does make for a ridiculous API though. No one writes X for this reason, but I suspect it would speed things up a lot if everyone writing for the platform didn't have to go through multiple layers of better APIs to talk to the actual display subsystem.
        sedachv 16y ago
        What is the "X API"? Are you talking about Xlib? XCB? The protocol? Does this critique include XRender? There's really two parts to modern X programming: the window and event stuff, and XRender. The window and event system isn't bad, and it's fully asynchronous, which is a really big deal. XRender obviously can't be used for drawing by hand (that's why you have Cairo), but it's a really good design for a drawing protocol that supports a lot of possibilities for hardware acceleration.
  - FooBarWidget 16y ago
    It looks like Wayland runs on top of X, not replacing X. Which makes sense. OpenGL is just an API, not a hardware wire-level protocol. Unless Wayland implements its own graphics drivers (which I find highly unlikely), it'll just make use of the same drivers that X uses for implementing OpenGL. And that still leaves things like input handling. From the Wikipedia entry it looks like Wayland uses X for input and rendering, but other apps can connect to Wayland to have things rendered. Kind of like how X itself works.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      It doesn't seem like that's mandatory, though it can run on top of X. From the project's front page blurb: The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers. They do have fairly well thought out plans for a (probably lengthy) transition of interoperating with X applications, though: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
    - mahmud 16y ago
      This is straight from this FAQ: Wayland is a nano display server, relying on drm modesetting, gem batchbuffer submission and hw initialization generally in the kernel. Wayland puts the compositing manager and display server in the same process. Window management is largely pushed to the clients, they draw their own decorations and move and resize themselves, typically implemented in a toolkit library. That last part about integrating the compositing manager and display server into the same process .. that's your main point of departure.
      - metageek 16y ago
        >Window management is largely pushed to the clients, they draw their own decorations and move and resize themselves, typically implemented in a toolkit library. Well, there's a bad idea. I suppose I could see an X replacement which incorporated window management into the server, instead of into a special client; but letting all the clients draw their own borders is a recipe for chaos.
- fauigerzigerk 16y ago
  The question is what worries you more. The somewhat stagnant, always lagging, always annoyingly close to usable Linux desktop experience or a pretty bold attempt at doing something about it.
  - darklajid 16y ago
    Or - the possible collaboration/support problems. Someone else quoted here that Wayland needs toolkit support for lots of things (moving, resizing, decorating). Are we going to see that support (possibly contributed in parts by Canonical) in gtk (and QT/KDE, fwiw)? Or is this basically going for Unity only? In other words: I appreciate a more modern, desktop oriented architecture. X11 seems just too much "Mainframe terminal" focused. Which is nice - but not on my laptop/netbook or in the majority of private use cases, really. I fear, though, that this leads to a two classes of desktops for a while: The shiny Wayland one and the poor thing that still needs X11. Note that "fear" implies more emotions than reasoning - I don't know enough about Wayland support in other toolkits yet and don't understand how it could/would work with "arbitrary" setups (Open-/Fluxbox, lxde, one of the tiling wms). Update: I was reading up on Wayland - and completely missed the blog entry from Mark. The statement "We’ll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there’s no reason for them not to be there on day one either." removes most of my fears.
    - crs 16y ago
      Well it appears that waylands first deployment is expected to be in MeeGo OS. So that implies Qt support will be developed and pushed by Nokia and Intel. Furthermore if you checkout waylands site, you can see screenshots of various Qt and Gtk based applications running on Wayland.
sgt 16y ago
I have no worries about this. Linux distributions always do a couple of releases of "disasters", (e.g. KDE 4) before it starts becoming stable. Wayland is theoretically superior and with iteration after iteration, I'm sure it's going to come out on top. Just don't be one of the early adopters, but that's a given when it comes to Ubuntu, in my experience (unless you really do like the risks involved with cutting edge software). The truth is, X is just too old fashioned and it's like trying to spend time maintaining an old car from the 1970s instead of just buying a new car with electronic fuel injection and excellent brakes.
- sqrt17 16y ago
  Have you ever tried to repair things in a new car with electronic fuel injection and computer-driven brakes? A huge advantage of X11 and all that other "70s technology" is that you can fix things more easily because it's built for being maintainable in the first place. Having said that, I think that splitting the X server into one lightweight compositing manager and one slightly less heavyweight X-server-on-top-of-the-compositing-manager is less of a disaster than what we got with KDE4. I'll only start worrying when KDE and Gnome catch up and they start having UI programs talk directly to the compositing engine.
  - barkingcat 16y ago
    I'm not sure about the easy to fix concept. By all accounts the X codebase is one nasty beast to wrap your head around. The protocols are well documented, but the actual code - it takes some crazy digging to actually understand it enough to be able to fix things in X-land.
  - wmf 16y ago
    Realistically, something like 1% of Ubuntu users could fix their xorg.conf. Either it works or it doesn't, and in my experience a simpler architecture (Wayland) is more likely to work.
mhd 16y ago
Named after Wayland the smith? Who killed the kids of his employer and fashioned goblets out of their skulls? Erm…
- ableal 16y ago
  Something about the performance review process, possibly: "[...] he was captured in his sleep by King Niðhad in Nerike who ordered him hamstrung and imprisoned [...]" (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_Smith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_Smith).
limmeau 16y ago
"Ditch X server" sounds like they're going to completely abandon X11. However, the Wayland FAQ[1] outlines ways of integrating X11 with Wayland, so I suppose users of, say, ddd are not going to suffer much. 1. https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/frequently-askeds-questions https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/f...
- Someone 16y ago
  If this gains sufficient traction, and if this provides a better-looking way to render stuff on screen, I guess this will lead to applications that talk the superior protocol, not The X protocol. Such applications would not run on X displays. If I interpret things correctly, the link you give explicitly describes such a scenario: Further down the road we run a user session natively under Wayland with clients written for Wayland. There will still (always) be X applications to run, but we now run these under a root-less X server that is itself a client of the Wayland server. This will inject the X windows into the Wayland session as native looking clients. The session Wayland server can run as a nested Wayland server under the system Wayland server described above, maybe even side by side with X sessions. So, the X protocol could still be there for quite some time to support 'old' applications, but new applications wouldn't use it anymore. There are quite a few if's here, though. The first non-Ubuntu application to drop X support could face quite an uphill battle.
  - xorglorb 16y ago
    So essentially it would be like Apple's X11. It will be there for backwards compatibility with older applications, but it will be considered "undesirable".
    - Someone 16y ago
      Yes, technocally, it would be like that. Sociologically, however, things would be quite different; Apple's users did not have zillions of X applications that they already used.
- RobGR 16y ago
lwhi 16y ago
I think Mark Shuttleworth is taking bold steps to ensure that Ubuntu is well positioned for the future. He's creating differentiation between Ubuntu and other debian-type distributions and he's potentially mapping out a route to new platforms. It does seem like he might be a gambling man though.
- daveungerer 16y ago
  Maybe gambling is too strong a word. He's not in it for the money, but to create a viable competitor to Microsoft. So not taking this "gamble" and sticking to the status quo would be actually be the riskier strategy for him. If it backfires, it doesn't take him that much further away from achieving his original goal.
- jhancock 16y ago
  It may seem bold but is well supported by Nokia (and Intel). MeeGo will use Wayland. Qt is being ported to Wayland. Nokia has firmly moved all its dev money squarely in this space. Recent moves show this is not an experiment or a side project for Nokia.
tumult 16y ago
I give this the thumbs-up. I'm not particularly fond of X11. In fact, I suspect it has been holding back GUI on GNU/Linux for a while.
- dkersten 16y ago
  I agree. X is one of the reasons I'm not terribly fond of Linux. I don't know if wayland will help, but trying new things is defintiely good for innovation and advancement, so I'm completely in favour of this move. Hopefully something awesome will come of it!
  - daliusd 16y ago
    Since it is backed by Intel and Nokia something positive should happen.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  A while? You must have never read the UNIX-HATERS Handbook (http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf), which should be required reading for any unix fan, along with the Plan9 design documents (cat-v.org). In this case, "the X Windows disaster" chapter seems most appropriate. Feel free to ignore the VMS fanboys, though. And yes, I am a dedicated unix (OpenBSD) user.
  - paol 16y ago
    While I loved reading the Unix haters handbook it gets many things wrong. It gets a lot right too, but the point is it takes some critical thinking (and good knowledge of Unix) to tell which is which. In that respect I found the chapter on X to be one of the weakest. They trot out the old "X named the client and server the wrong way around" chestnut for example...
    - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
      Yes, I completely agree: that's the "ignore the VMS fanboys" part. It's a very good resource, but a rather uncritical collection of criticisms - some highlight important deficiencies, some highlight alternative implementations, some of it is out-of-date (most unices are quite stable nowadays), and some are just plain ignorant. I recall the chapter on X being rather sensible, but I don't exactly love X either. Maybe that coloured my perception.
paol 16y ago
This is a huge shift if it happens. X has been synonymous with GUIs on unix for more than 20 years, and has accumulated all the attendant baggage (both good and bad). There are also some big consequences for the linux landscape. The first and obvious one is that if other distros don't imitate Ubuntu they will drift farther apart. People complain about Ubuntu going their own way now, image what it will be like if they're on Wayland+Unity and others stick to X+Base Gnome. Another, subtler consequence of Shuttleworth's announcement is the message it sends to graphics card vendors (well, NVIDIA really). Wayland is dependent on the newest linux graphics stack, very much by design. But that stack is relatively new (e.g. kernel mode setting) and nvidia never updated their driver architecture to match. I assume this will force their hand because Ubuntu is too big to ignore.
- pilom 16y ago
  Ubuntu is certainly not too big to ignore. I have never seen any source say Linux (let alone Ubuntu) has more than 5% marketshare. Does your company support 800x600? How about IE6?
  - notauser 16y ago
    If I was selling software to defense companies I'd support IE6. If I was selling software to primary school teachers I'd support 800x600. If I was selling technology to engineers (especially CUDA types building render farms of thousands of nodes) you can bet your life I'd support Ubuntu. I wouldn't want to give them any reasons at all not to use my stuff everywhere, in case I accidentally opened a niche my competitor could dominate and expand from. These days games are just a part of Nvidia's market.
    - mikebike 16y ago
      None of the mechanical engineering packages (finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics) I've encountered explicitly support Ubuntu. Typically, it's RHEL that is explicitly supported.
      - 16y ago
alexyoung 16y ago
I'm not familiar with Wayland, so I read the architecture article: "Wayland is a complete window system in itself, but even so, if we're migrating away from X, it makes sense to have a good backwards compatibility story." http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
- skymt 16y ago
  I'd rather see Wayland implement the X protocol themselves rather than proxy to Xorg. Running X and Wayland simultaneously could have performance implications on older computers or netbooks, two of Ubuntu's biggest targets.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    Why would running two systems help performance. A better designed system that doesn't have to have network transparency code paths should be able to run faster than X and Linux applications are written in Qt or GTK anyway. Port those two and call it done.
    - skymt 16y ago
      Sorry, I wasn't clear: running X alongside Wayland would hurt performance (at least in RAM-critical environments).
jbk 16y ago
I really wonder how we are going to manage Wayland for video: - does it support Xv or the like? Or are we going to use the broken OpenGL drivers (no working overlay for most of them...) - does it support VAAPI or VDPAU, that seems very linked to x11 too? We'll see, but I have a bad feeling.
- benmccann 16y ago
  My fear is lack of remote desktop. I would never use a Linux desktop without NX support.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    Remote desktop is easy, there's no reason to make it the focus of the GUI subsystem.
gvb 16y ago
Just for comparison, Apple "ditched" X too (they never used X). When they went to OS X they used Display Postscript rather than X. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript This has been a mixed bag: it has been good for Apple-only programs, but it significantly slowed and complicated the porting of existing and new X-based programs to Apple.
- rufugee 16y ago
  Yeah, and it made starting up any X-based application on OS X a real pain. X apps are second-class citizens. This is one (of many) reasons I could never quite reach a level of comfort on a Mac.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - alextgordon 16y ago
    It's a calculated move on Apple's part. They don't want you to use X11, so they make it as painful as possible while still keeping it usable so that developers can't write new apps for it (they have to use Cocoa). It's strictly compatibility environment only.
    - niels_olson 16y ago
      > It's a calculated move on Apple's part. that seems unlikely in light of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872915 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872915
      - sipefree 16y ago
        AFAIK (I don't have the source right now), Apple originally considered using X11 for the display server on OS X (in fact, early versions shipped with a version of xf86 that ran natively as it does on other *nixes), but after deciding on all the compositing and prettiness features that they wanted, they would have torn so much out of X11 that it wouldn't be remotely compatible anymore, so they wrote Quartz 2D. Later, of course, things like Compiz came along, but they've always seemed like weak hacks compared to things like Quartz. Hopefully wayland will change everything.
motters 16y ago
It looks as if Shuttleworth is concentrating squarely on desktop bling, and this may be the right strategy if he wants Ubuntu to gain mass popularity and really eat into the Windows user base.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  How? From what I gather, Wayland is better for the mobile/touch space, servers don't use GUIs and there's not much that uses only X...
  - jrockway 16y ago
    So, did you post that comment from a mobile phone or a server? Oh yeah, there's this thing called a "workstation". I hear there are a few in existence...
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - StavrosK 16y ago
      That's odd, the comment I replied to was saying that x is useful for things other than workstations, and I was saying that it wasn't more useful than weyland on mobiles and servers. I have no idea how this comment mixup happened...
rick_2047 16y ago
Just one question, I hear that Wayland is hugely dependent on the latest Graphics cards. So that would mean that ubuntu will no longer be usable by people like me who have moderately old hardware (mine is p4 with on board intel graphics, which are already having problems even with X). I liked how ubuntu was stable on my computer (till around 8.10 I think and 9.04 was not bad). I will miss the compatibility
- agentultra 16y ago
  Same here. My three year old laptop has gotten slower with every consecutive release of Ubuntu. I'm afraid to upgrade to the latest let alone to this new GL-based display server. Guess I'll just have to switch to a 'lighter' distro with less fireworks. I'm sure it will pay off for Ubuntu in the end... I just hope it doesn't actually start a trend for other distros to follow suit.
  - rick_2047 16y ago
    I switched to puppy linux and am loving the no-os-on-my-HD style (of course I can do a frugal install, but I am just lazy)
    - jawee 16y ago
      I too love Puppy Linux! It works great on my netbook.. faster than any of even the netbook-optimized distributions. I'm still running 4.3. The hardware support was even perfect with the LuPu on my main laptop, but I'm holding off as a lot of software packages I use are a pain... (openSUSE on this machine).
  - Sapient 16y ago
    There will always be Xubuntu for older computers though.
- theclay 16y ago
  There are light-weight versions of ubuntu available. And if that doesn't work, you can go to even lighter linux distros like Puppy Linux that load everything to ram and run like lightning. Bottom line: you're good to go
marcusfrex 16y ago
That is factinating. What makes Mac OSX on desktop is based on Quartz and Linux needed something like that to be more solid and modern on desktop environments. So let be it.
chopsueyar 16y ago
How will this affect LTSP and the future of thin clients with regards to Ubuntu?
- wmf 16y ago
  They'll probably use Wayland with SPICE.
  - chopsueyar 16y ago
    Do you have a link? All I can find is the circuit simulator results.
    - wmf 16y ago
      I can see how that would be confusing. I'm talking about Red Hat SPICE, a replacement for VNC. http://www.spicespace.org/ http://www.spicespace.org/
templaedhel 16y ago
>>After shocking everyone with the announcement that Ubuntu 11.04 will have Unity on the desktop instead of GNOME Shell, >> Unity is going to use Wayland display server instead of X. This will not be implemented in Ubuntu 11.04 however. >>X will remain until 11.04 however. I assume the last two relese dates/version are incorrect, because unity is being added for 11.04, and the article seemed to say the change to Wayland would happen after the change to unity.
topbanana 16y ago
Is there a distribution I can download that is already using Wayland? I'd like to take a look. For my part, the desktop manager is the one thing holding me back from Linux. (OK, that and Visual Studio)
- AntiRush 16y ago
  I don't believe so. Wayland is in the really early stage of development right now, which makes me read this announcement as "Ubuntu is going to start committing developers to Wayland. You can build it with these instructions: https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/building-and-running-wayland https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/b... .
rams 16y ago
Sigh,my first job was to work on a proprietary X-server extension. Despite Jim Gettys' and Keith Packard's continued interest, and some interest from vendors as well, X seems to be losing hacker mind share. There were some fast proprietary X servers made by a few companies like Xig graphics that delivered truly incredible performance. But the really exciting things that could be done with X never saw daylight outside a small community of display manufacturers for defense, air-traffic control, etc
- bokchoi 16y ago
  But the really exciting things that could be done with X never saw daylight outside a small community of display manufacturers for defense, air-traffic control, etc What sort of exciting things?
  - beza1e1 16y ago
    Here is one vendor for example: http://www.x-software.com http://www.x-software.com
cookiecaper 16y ago
Unless they're planning this for 13.04 or later, it definitely sounds like a bad deal. Wayland just moved to a "real" project space outside of Kristian's personal repo, and it is nowhere near mature enough to support something like Ubuntu. Even if GTK and QT "mostly work", there's still a lot more in the X ecosystem that is hard to replace, namely proprietary drivers and the knowledgebase associated with working with X. Even Ubuntu has a history of pushing out reliable, mature applications for much less mature ones on the basis of theoretical improvements. Look at Empathy and Pidgin; I still get crashes from Empathy all the time, the skinning and font-size support have problems, etc., whereas Pidgin just works great. Why couldn't they have just affixed the Telepathy backend as a major player in Pidgin, or at least forked and made Empathy a Pidgin derivative? It would have worked out much better. I'm just hoping that Arch doesn't freak out and fear that Ubuntu is becoming more "bleeding edge" than Arch and remove X for Wayland in the next three weeks.
- dfranke 16y ago
  You're right, which is why I'll continue to stick with Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS while this all blows over. It will blow over, however, and I'm happy to have a major player out there forcing it to happen.
  - barnaby 16y ago
    We use Ubuntu LTS at work because of the stability. On my laptop at home though (which I only really use for watching movies, and for hacking on side-projects that one day may become HN stories) I'm always on cutting edge Ubuntu. I love the thrill of the beta's. So I'll do the dual strategy of letting it blow over for work purposes, and playing around in the mud for personal purposes.
    - lhnn 16y ago
      Where do you work? If you're allowed to say, I'm always interested in hearing about Linux deployments, much less Ubuntu and/or professional "desktop" Linux usage. There should be an Ubuntu testimonials website... Weekend project?
theclay 16y ago
God! I can hardly stand to read the digitizor website from all the crap they have jacked up and hyperlinked for advertising. I'm on Chrome. Is there a feature that lets you get control of that mess? Edit: I apologize for the off-topic posting, but the linked website is a good example of what readers of Hacker News seem to have tricks for handling.
- cpach 16y ago
  I recommend Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
naner 16y ago
This is the actual announcement by Shuttleworth: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
jamii 16y ago
I guess this means someone is going to have to port xmonad...
- dfranke 16y ago
  You mean all 2000 lines or so of the core that almost everything else is built on?
  - thingie 16y ago
    Xmonad core doesn't provide any kind of X11 encapsulation and convenience interface, every single xmonad extension, any piece of configuration, can (and does) directly use X11, both API and behavior. After all, it's an X11 window manager. You have to rewrite everything.
maguay 16y ago
With the Software Center, Unity interface, and now a new display server, looks like Ubuntu is shooting for the mainstream OS business. Interesting to see an Linux distro trying so hard to set itself apart.
- fhars 16y ago
  Ubuntu has always been shooting for the mainstream, it is the central goal of the project. Just look at bug 1.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Link, for those that haven't seen it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
    - maguay 16y ago
      Thanks, I'd never seen that. Very humorous :) They should make another one: Bug #2: Apple has a majority mind-share
sielskr 16y ago
I've been unhappy with X since I learned enough (in the 90s) to have an opinion -- but not for the reason Shuttleworth gives: "We don’t believe X is setup to deliver the user experience we want, with super-smooth graphics and effects. I understand that it’s possible to get amazing results with X, but it’s extremely hard, and isn’t going to get easier. Some of the core goals of X make it harder to achieve these user experiences on X than on native GL" My unhappiness stems from my perception that the ways I have tried to customize X and things closely coupled to X (e.g., my window manager) have proved much more difficult (and in particular have forced me to contend with much more complexity) than they could have.
- wmf 16y ago
  In that case, I think you'll hate future Ubuntu because (like its mentor OS X) it won't be very configurable at all. Easy things will be easy and everything else will be impossible.
  - hasenj 16y ago
    Except the code will be open so if Canonical doesn't make it configurable, other people can, and if they do it right without introducing unneeded complexity, their patches might just make it upstream (Ubuntu). This is assuming of course that people who like to fiddle with their display will stay with Ubuntu. Not many people like to do that anyway. But if there are people who want that kind of control, it's not impossible.
macco 16y ago
That is why I love Ubuntu: They like to take the bold decisions. Mark Shuttleworth is a small Version of Steve Jobs :)
- utku_karatas2 16y ago
  Let's say "open version".
  - macco 16y ago
    Nice own. I met him personally. Totally incredable guy, who knows how to work with people.
hasenj 16y ago
This is great news for the Free Desktop. Ubuntu is really setting itself apart as its own OS rather than just another Linux distro. It might take about two years for this whole thing to sort of stabilize (Wayland + Unity), but when it does, Ubuntu will be kick-ass like it's never been before. I love it when people step outside the box.
- nodata 16y ago
  Wayland was started by someone at Red Hat.
  - hasenj 16y ago
    It would be great to see Fedora using it too, but I don't know if that will happen. RHEL is not likely to use it, IMO, because it's not network-transparent. And f RHEL won't use it, Fedora probably won't use it. That said, what's setting Ubuntu apart is the fact they're moving away from the traditional stack (X -> GNOME). This is significant enough IMO. Other distros might follow, and in that case, there will be two kinda of distros: those that use X, and those that use Wayland.
Aegean 16y ago
For me X has always symbolized old, hard to configure, clunky, and ugly. It wasn't meant to be part of Unix but it mixed in. I am glad to see it go at least from our desktops.
- nodata 16y ago
  X has worked for years with no configuration. Not sure if symbolisation is important here, if it was, we'd just rename it.
- beza1e1 16y ago
  I found X quite easy to configure. Just set a few values in Xorg.conf and nowdays it even works without this sometimes. X11 as a protocol is old and mature like TCP or SMTP. Just like SMTP it has some problems, but Wayland throws away some core features to fix it. Hopefully, Wayland is flexible enough to get network transparency like X11 at some point.
  - baq 16y ago
    >Just set a few values in Xorg.conf and nowdays it even works without this sometimes. you make it sound like it was an advantage.
- nwmcsween 16y ago
  Unix is old clunky and hard to configure. I could go far into details, I could even write a book on the subject and I have been using it since the early 90's because there is no alternative with traction.
known 16y ago
http://www.microxwin.com/architecture.html http://www.microxwin.com/architecture.html
cjtenny 16y ago
does this mean my hometown will fade into even greater obscurity (as quantified by google search results)? :( http://www.wayland.k12.ma.us/ http://www.wayland.k12.ma.us/
sedachv 16y ago
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html This is really stupid and I hope this project fails like all the other "let's replace X!!!" masturbation in the 00s. There is no evidence offered that involving the compositor in event handling is a performance problem in X (hint: like all the "X is slow because it is networked!" nonsense, it's probably not true). Even if that were true, this doesn't explain why the problem is better solved by starting from scratch rather than extending the Xcomposite extension. But hey, let's write a new graphics system! We can get wonderful advantages like: * Removing any hope of network transparency. After all, all I have is one computer and all I do with it is play videogames and watch porn. * Come up with a new API! Everyone appreciates having to rewrite their libraries and applications to new and incompatible specifications. * We need backwards-compatibility, so let's REIMPLEMENT ALL OF X! It will be really easy! And bug free! * Old computers? Who wants to use those? Obviously we're not going to implement drivers for older hardware. A tell-tale sign that this project is a dead-end is this statement: "rendering library such as OpenGL." OpenGL is not a rendering library, it's a specification. Just like the X protocol is a specification. If you don't understand why that's important, you shouldn't be trying to write a replacement for X. ----- Ok, nevermind the "no network transparency" part: "Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers." http://wayland.freedesktop.org/ http://wayland.freedesktop.org/ This actually looks somewhat reasonable. (I wanted to post this addendum as a reply instead of editing because the points above characterize why most of the 00s X-replacement projects failed, but HN won't let me) ------ Another edit. This time quoting the FAQ (https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/frequently-askeds-questions?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/f...): "It's a minimal server that lets clients communicate GEM buffers and information about updates to those buffers to a compositor." "Wayland doesn't get in the business of rendering, it expects the clients to use whatever means they prefer to render data into a GEM buffer and when it's done, inform the Wayland server of the new contents." "Because we for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models the Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option." "The problem with X is that... it's X." "No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients." This is actually as stupid as I originally thought. Now I really, really want it to fail.
zokier 16y ago
So the sound system is actually working again so lets break the display system next.
augustl 16y ago
I would just like to point out that Arch Linux with GNOME works just fine. I'm sure there are tons of other distros out there, too, that work just fine. If you don't like what's coming in Ubuntu, just switch. you probably won't notice much difference between ubuntu 10.10 and [insert distro] with GNOME.

369 points by dkd903 16y ago

guest 16y ago

I have a worry of this turning out very badly.

mahmud 16y ago
Wayland uses OpenGL ES for rendering, preparing Ubuntu for handsets. Ubuntu must be eying a future alongside Android, which is an excellent bet. There have been many attempts at X replacement, all well justified, and if Wayland is the best of them, it would still be better than the baroque X protocol. Like almost every C++ programmer working in the early 00s, I too hacked on Berlin :-|
- guest 16y ago
  The idea of Wayland growing and becoming a more usable platform sound terrific. The troubling part about this is ubuntu's history of doing what's good for ubuntu.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
    - mg74 16y ago
      Ubuntu Unity is a desktop shell replacement and has nothing to do with the Unity game development platform. Or was this a joke and I just wooshed it?
      - mahmud 16y ago
        Nope, not a joke. I am really that stupid.
    - almost 16y ago
      I dont think the Unity shell and Unity game platform are in any way related. Am i wrong? EDIT: Sorry, I thought I was the only one pointing out the error but looks like I formed part of a mob. Anyway, it's an easy mistake to make, you can hardly be blamed for not following every little detail of Ubuntu and the things that run on it :)
      - mahmud 16y ago
        I have already admitted to my error elsewhere, but just for the sake of intellectual honesty .. I do think Unity3D is somewhat of an under-appreciated technology.
    - akent 16y ago
      I think you're confusing http://unity3d.com/ http://unity3d.com/ with https://launchpad.net/unity https://launchpad.net/unity. Unity desktop is GPL3 / LGPL3.
      - mahmud 16y ago
        Please upvote this guy while you egg me on the face. BLOODY HELL! What a relief! But can you blame me given the name and purpose proximity? :-/
    - weego 16y ago
      Either I'm confused or you are: I was under the impression that when they talk about Unity they mean a replacement shell for Gnome and not the web plugin. Or is this a different conversation?
  - lhnn 16y ago
    Why is it troubling for a company or organization to do what's in their best interest? Ubuntu's goals do not seem to be nefarious, and almost everything they're pushing for the community is open-source, except Ubuntu One and the Software Center ability to purchase apps.
- _delirium 16y ago
  This seems less ambitious than Berlin in a lot of ways. One big difference is that Berlin aimed for network transparency (like X, but ideally done even better), while Wayland is local-only. That might simplify enough things to make it more likely to succeed. For me personally, now that nx makes X's network transparency actually usable, I'm not in a big hurry to go back to a non-network-transparent windowing system with a screenscraper like VNC layered on top. But I could see that not mattering for a lot of users, so it's probably the right choice.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    This seems less ambitious than Berlin in a lot of ways. Worse is better, and whoever ships a working prototype is best. Sacrificing network transparency for local performance should be a no-brainer, given the use-cases.
    - FooBarWidget 16y ago
      The bottleneck in X has never been network transparency. Local access has been accelerated through Unix domain sockets and shared memory for as long as I can remember. It looks like Wayland also has a client/server architecture which makes me suspect it's can be made network transparent just like X is.
      - loewenskind 16y ago
        It does make for a ridiculous API though. No one writes X for this reason, but I suspect it would speed things up a lot if everyone writing for the platform didn't have to go through multiple layers of better APIs to talk to the actual display subsystem.
        sedachv 16y ago
        What is the "X API"? Are you talking about Xlib? XCB? The protocol? Does this critique include XRender? There's really two parts to modern X programming: the window and event stuff, and XRender. The window and event system isn't bad, and it's fully asynchronous, which is a really big deal. XRender obviously can't be used for drawing by hand (that's why you have Cairo), but it's a really good design for a drawing protocol that supports a lot of possibilities for hardware acceleration.
- FooBarWidget 16y ago
  It looks like Wayland runs on top of X, not replacing X. Which makes sense. OpenGL is just an API, not a hardware wire-level protocol. Unless Wayland implements its own graphics drivers (which I find highly unlikely), it'll just make use of the same drivers that X uses for implementing OpenGL. And that still leaves things like input handling. From the Wikipedia entry it looks like Wayland uses X for input and rendering, but other apps can connect to Wayland to have things rendered. Kind of like how X itself works.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    It doesn't seem like that's mandatory, though it can run on top of X. From the project's front page blurb: The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers. They do have fairly well thought out plans for a (probably lengthy) transition of interoperating with X applications, though: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
  - mahmud 16y ago
    This is straight from this FAQ: Wayland is a nano display server, relying on drm modesetting, gem batchbuffer submission and hw initialization generally in the kernel. Wayland puts the compositing manager and display server in the same process. Window management is largely pushed to the clients, they draw their own decorations and move and resize themselves, typically implemented in a toolkit library. That last part about integrating the compositing manager and display server into the same process .. that's your main point of departure.
    - metageek 16y ago
      >Window management is largely pushed to the clients, they draw their own decorations and move and resize themselves, typically implemented in a toolkit library. Well, there's a bad idea. I suppose I could see an X replacement which incorporated window management into the server, instead of into a special client; but letting all the clients draw their own borders is a recipe for chaos.
fauigerzigerk 16y ago
The question is what worries you more. The somewhat stagnant, always lagging, always annoyingly close to usable Linux desktop experience or a pretty bold attempt at doing something about it.
- darklajid 16y ago
  Or - the possible collaboration/support problems. Someone else quoted here that Wayland needs toolkit support for lots of things (moving, resizing, decorating). Are we going to see that support (possibly contributed in parts by Canonical) in gtk (and QT/KDE, fwiw)? Or is this basically going for Unity only? In other words: I appreciate a more modern, desktop oriented architecture. X11 seems just too much "Mainframe terminal" focused. Which is nice - but not on my laptop/netbook or in the majority of private use cases, really. I fear, though, that this leads to a two classes of desktops for a while: The shiny Wayland one and the poor thing that still needs X11. Note that "fear" implies more emotions than reasoning - I don't know enough about Wayland support in other toolkits yet and don't understand how it could/would work with "arbitrary" setups (Open-/Fluxbox, lxde, one of the tiling wms). Update: I was reading up on Wayland - and completely missed the blog entry from Mark. The statement "We’ll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there’s no reason for them not to be there on day one either." removes most of my fears.
  - crs 16y ago
    Well it appears that waylands first deployment is expected to be in MeeGo OS. So that implies Qt support will be developed and pushed by Nokia and Intel. Furthermore if you checkout waylands site, you can see screenshots of various Qt and Gtk based applications running on Wayland.

sgt 16y ago

I have no worries about this. Linux distributions always do a couple of releases of "disasters", (e.g. KDE 4) before it starts becoming stable. Wayland is theoretically superior and with iteration after iteration, I'm sure it's going to come out on top. Just don't be one of the early adopters, but that's a given when it comes to Ubuntu, in my experience (unless you really do like the risks involved with cutting edge software). The truth is, X is just too old fashioned and it's like trying to spend time maintaining an old car from the 1970s instead of just buying a new car with electronic fuel injection and excellent brakes.

sqrt17 16y ago
Have you ever tried to repair things in a new car with electronic fuel injection and computer-driven brakes? A huge advantage of X11 and all that other "70s technology" is that you can fix things more easily because it's built for being maintainable in the first place. Having said that, I think that splitting the X server into one lightweight compositing manager and one slightly less heavyweight X-server-on-top-of-the-compositing-manager is less of a disaster than what we got with KDE4. I'll only start worrying when KDE and Gnome catch up and they start having UI programs talk directly to the compositing engine.
- barkingcat 16y ago
  I'm not sure about the easy to fix concept. By all accounts the X codebase is one nasty beast to wrap your head around. The protocols are well documented, but the actual code - it takes some crazy digging to actually understand it enough to be able to fix things in X-land.
- wmf 16y ago
  Realistically, something like 1% of Ubuntu users could fix their xorg.conf. Either it works or it doesn't, and in my experience a simpler architecture (Wayland) is more likely to work.

mhd 16y ago

Named after Wayland the smith? Who killed the kids of his employer and fashioned goblets out of their skulls? Erm…

ableal 16y ago
Something about the performance review process, possibly: "[...] he was captured in his sleep by King Niðhad in Nerike who ordered him hamstrung and imprisoned [...]" (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_Smith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_Smith).

limmeau 16y ago

"Ditch X server" sounds like they're going to completely abandon X11. However, the Wayland FAQ[1] outlines ways of integrating X11 with Wayland, so I suppose users of, say, ddd are not going to suffer much. 1. https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/frequently-askeds-questions https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/f...

Someone 16y ago
If this gains sufficient traction, and if this provides a better-looking way to render stuff on screen, I guess this will lead to applications that talk the superior protocol, not The X protocol. Such applications would not run on X displays. If I interpret things correctly, the link you give explicitly describes such a scenario: Further down the road we run a user session natively under Wayland with clients written for Wayland. There will still (always) be X applications to run, but we now run these under a root-less X server that is itself a client of the Wayland server. This will inject the X windows into the Wayland session as native looking clients. The session Wayland server can run as a nested Wayland server under the system Wayland server described above, maybe even side by side with X sessions. So, the X protocol could still be there for quite some time to support 'old' applications, but new applications wouldn't use it anymore. There are quite a few if's here, though. The first non-Ubuntu application to drop X support could face quite an uphill battle.
- xorglorb 16y ago
  So essentially it would be like Apple's X11. It will be there for backwards compatibility with older applications, but it will be considered "undesirable".
  - Someone 16y ago
    Yes, technocally, it would be like that. Sociologically, however, things would be quite different; Apple's users did not have zillions of X applications that they already used.
RobGR 16y ago

lwhi 16y ago

I think Mark Shuttleworth is taking bold steps to ensure that Ubuntu is well positioned for the future. He's creating differentiation between Ubuntu and other debian-type distributions and he's potentially mapping out a route to new platforms. It does seem like he might be a gambling man though.

daveungerer 16y ago
Maybe gambling is too strong a word. He's not in it for the money, but to create a viable competitor to Microsoft. So not taking this "gamble" and sticking to the status quo would be actually be the riskier strategy for him. If it backfires, it doesn't take him that much further away from achieving his original goal.
jhancock 16y ago
It may seem bold but is well supported by Nokia (and Intel). MeeGo will use Wayland. Qt is being ported to Wayland. Nokia has firmly moved all its dev money squarely in this space. Recent moves show this is not an experiment or a side project for Nokia.

tumult 16y ago

I give this the thumbs-up. I'm not particularly fond of X11. In fact, I suspect it has been holding back GUI on GNU/Linux for a while.

dkersten 16y ago
I agree. X is one of the reasons I'm not terribly fond of Linux. I don't know if wayland will help, but trying new things is defintiely good for innovation and advancement, so I'm completely in favour of this move. Hopefully something awesome will come of it!
- daliusd 16y ago
  Since it is backed by Intel and Nokia something positive should happen.
JoachimSchipper 16y ago
A while? You must have never read the UNIX-HATERS Handbook (http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf), which should be required reading for any unix fan, along with the Plan9 design documents (cat-v.org). In this case, "the X Windows disaster" chapter seems most appropriate. Feel free to ignore the VMS fanboys, though. And yes, I am a dedicated unix (OpenBSD) user.
- paol 16y ago
  While I loved reading the Unix haters handbook it gets many things wrong. It gets a lot right too, but the point is it takes some critical thinking (and good knowledge of Unix) to tell which is which. In that respect I found the chapter on X to be one of the weakest. They trot out the old "X named the client and server the wrong way around" chestnut for example...
  - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
    Yes, I completely agree: that's the "ignore the VMS fanboys" part. It's a very good resource, but a rather uncritical collection of criticisms - some highlight important deficiencies, some highlight alternative implementations, some of it is out-of-date (most unices are quite stable nowadays), and some are just plain ignorant. I recall the chapter on X being rather sensible, but I don't exactly love X either. Maybe that coloured my perception.

paol 16y ago

This is a huge shift if it happens. X has been synonymous with GUIs on unix for more than 20 years, and has accumulated all the attendant baggage (both good and bad). There are also some big consequences for the linux landscape. The first and obvious one is that if other distros don't imitate Ubuntu they will drift farther apart. People complain about Ubuntu going their own way now, image what it will be like if they're on Wayland+Unity and others stick to X+Base Gnome. Another, subtler consequence of Shuttleworth's announcement is the message it sends to graphics card vendors (well, NVIDIA really). Wayland is dependent on the newest linux graphics stack, very much by design. But that stack is relatively new (e.g. kernel mode setting) and nvidia never updated their driver architecture to match. I assume this will force their hand because Ubuntu is too big to ignore.

pilom 16y ago
Ubuntu is certainly not too big to ignore. I have never seen any source say Linux (let alone Ubuntu) has more than 5% marketshare. Does your company support 800x600? How about IE6?
- notauser 16y ago
  If I was selling software to defense companies I'd support IE6. If I was selling software to primary school teachers I'd support 800x600. If I was selling technology to engineers (especially CUDA types building render farms of thousands of nodes) you can bet your life I'd support Ubuntu. I wouldn't want to give them any reasons at all not to use my stuff everywhere, in case I accidentally opened a niche my competitor could dominate and expand from. These days games are just a part of Nvidia's market.
  - mikebike 16y ago
    None of the mechanical engineering packages (finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics) I've encountered explicitly support Ubuntu. Typically, it's RHEL that is explicitly supported.
    - 16y ago

alexyoung 16y ago

I'm not familiar with Wayland, so I read the architecture article: "Wayland is a complete window system in itself, but even so, if we're migrating away from X, it makes sense to have a good backwards compatibility story." http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

skymt 16y ago
I'd rather see Wayland implement the X protocol themselves rather than proxy to Xorg. Running X and Wayland simultaneously could have performance implications on older computers or netbooks, two of Ubuntu's biggest targets.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Why would running two systems help performance. A better designed system that doesn't have to have network transparency code paths should be able to run faster than X and Linux applications are written in Qt or GTK anyway. Port those two and call it done.
  - skymt 16y ago
    Sorry, I wasn't clear: running X alongside Wayland would hurt performance (at least in RAM-critical environments).

jbk 16y ago

I really wonder how we are going to manage Wayland for video: - does it support Xv or the like? Or are we going to use the broken OpenGL drivers (no working overlay for most of them...) - does it support VAAPI or VDPAU, that seems very linked to x11 too? We'll see, but I have a bad feeling.

benmccann 16y ago
My fear is lack of remote desktop. I would never use a Linux desktop without NX support.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Remote desktop is easy, there's no reason to make it the focus of the GUI subsystem.

gvb 16y ago

Just for comparison, Apple "ditched" X too (they never used X). When they went to OS X they used Display Postscript rather than X. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript This has been a mixed bag: it has been good for Apple-only programs, but it significantly slowed and complicated the porting of existing and new X-based programs to Apple.

rufugee 16y ago
Yeah, and it made starting up any X-based application on OS X a real pain. X apps are second-class citizens. This is one (of many) reasons I could never quite reach a level of comfort on a Mac.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- alextgordon 16y ago
  It's a calculated move on Apple's part. They don't want you to use X11, so they make it as painful as possible while still keeping it usable so that developers can't write new apps for it (they have to use Cocoa). It's strictly compatibility environment only.
  - niels_olson 16y ago
    > It's a calculated move on Apple's part. that seems unlikely in light of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872915 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872915
    - sipefree 16y ago
      AFAIK (I don't have the source right now), Apple originally considered using X11 for the display server on OS X (in fact, early versions shipped with a version of xf86 that ran natively as it does on other *nixes), but after deciding on all the compositing and prettiness features that they wanted, they would have torn so much out of X11 that it wouldn't be remotely compatible anymore, so they wrote Quartz 2D. Later, of course, things like Compiz came along, but they've always seemed like weak hacks compared to things like Quartz. Hopefully wayland will change everything.

motters 16y ago

It looks as if Shuttleworth is concentrating squarely on desktop bling, and this may be the right strategy if he wants Ubuntu to gain mass popularity and really eat into the Windows user base.

StavrosK 16y ago
How? From what I gather, Wayland is better for the mobile/touch space, servers don't use GUIs and there's not much that uses only X...
- jrockway 16y ago
  So, did you post that comment from a mobile phone or a server? Oh yeah, there's this thing called a "workstation". I hear there are a few in existence...
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    That's odd, the comment I replied to was saying that x is useful for things other than workstations, and I was saying that it wasn't more useful than weyland on mobiles and servers. I have no idea how this comment mixup happened...

rick_2047 16y ago

Just one question, I hear that Wayland is hugely dependent on the latest Graphics cards. So that would mean that ubuntu will no longer be usable by people like me who have moderately old hardware (mine is p4 with on board intel graphics, which are already having problems even with X). I liked how ubuntu was stable on my computer (till around 8.10 I think and 9.04 was not bad). I will miss the compatibility

agentultra 16y ago
Same here. My three year old laptop has gotten slower with every consecutive release of Ubuntu. I'm afraid to upgrade to the latest let alone to this new GL-based display server. Guess I'll just have to switch to a 'lighter' distro with less fireworks. I'm sure it will pay off for Ubuntu in the end... I just hope it doesn't actually start a trend for other distros to follow suit.
- rick_2047 16y ago
  I switched to puppy linux and am loving the no-os-on-my-HD style (of course I can do a frugal install, but I am just lazy)
  - jawee 16y ago
    I too love Puppy Linux! It works great on my netbook.. faster than any of even the netbook-optimized distributions. I'm still running 4.3. The hardware support was even perfect with the LuPu on my main laptop, but I'm holding off as a lot of software packages I use are a pain... (openSUSE on this machine).
- Sapient 16y ago
  There will always be Xubuntu for older computers though.
theclay 16y ago
There are light-weight versions of ubuntu available. And if that doesn't work, you can go to even lighter linux distros like Puppy Linux that load everything to ram and run like lightning. Bottom line: you're good to go

marcusfrex 16y ago

That is factinating. What makes Mac OSX on desktop is based on Quartz and Linux needed something like that to be more solid and modern on desktop environments. So let be it.

chopsueyar 16y ago

How will this affect LTSP and the future of thin clients with regards to Ubuntu?

wmf 16y ago
They'll probably use Wayland with SPICE.
- chopsueyar 16y ago
  Do you have a link? All I can find is the circuit simulator results.
  - wmf 16y ago
    I can see how that would be confusing. I'm talking about Red Hat SPICE, a replacement for VNC. http://www.spicespace.org/ http://www.spicespace.org/

templaedhel 16y ago

>>After shocking everyone with the announcement that Ubuntu 11.04 will have Unity on the desktop instead of GNOME Shell, >> Unity is going to use Wayland display server instead of X. This will not be implemented in Ubuntu 11.04 however. >>X will remain until 11.04 however. I assume the last two relese dates/version are incorrect, because unity is being added for 11.04, and the article seemed to say the change to Wayland would happen after the change to unity.

topbanana 16y ago

Is there a distribution I can download that is already using Wayland? I'd like to take a look. For my part, the desktop manager is the one thing holding me back from Linux. (OK, that and Visual Studio)

AntiRush 16y ago
I don't believe so. Wayland is in the really early stage of development right now, which makes me read this announcement as "Ubuntu is going to start committing developers to Wayland. You can build it with these instructions: https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/building-and-running-wayland https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/b... .

rams 16y ago

Sigh,my first job was to work on a proprietary X-server extension. Despite Jim Gettys' and Keith Packard's continued interest, and some interest from vendors as well, X seems to be losing hacker mind share. There were some fast proprietary X servers made by a few companies like Xig graphics that delivered truly incredible performance. But the really exciting things that could be done with X never saw daylight outside a small community of display manufacturers for defense, air-traffic control, etc

bokchoi 16y ago
But the really exciting things that could be done with X never saw daylight outside a small community of display manufacturers for defense, air-traffic control, etc What sort of exciting things?
- beza1e1 16y ago
  Here is one vendor for example: http://www.x-software.com http://www.x-software.com

cookiecaper 16y ago

Unless they're planning this for 13.04 or later, it definitely sounds like a bad deal. Wayland just moved to a "real" project space outside of Kristian's personal repo, and it is nowhere near mature enough to support something like Ubuntu. Even if GTK and QT "mostly work", there's still a lot more in the X ecosystem that is hard to replace, namely proprietary drivers and the knowledgebase associated with working with X. Even Ubuntu has a history of pushing out reliable, mature applications for much less mature ones on the basis of theoretical improvements. Look at Empathy and Pidgin; I still get crashes from Empathy all the time, the skinning and font-size support have problems, etc., whereas Pidgin just works great. Why couldn't they have just affixed the Telepathy backend as a major player in Pidgin, or at least forked and made Empathy a Pidgin derivative? It would have worked out much better. I'm just hoping that Arch doesn't freak out and fear that Ubuntu is becoming more "bleeding edge" than Arch and remove X for Wayland in the next three weeks.

dfranke 16y ago
You're right, which is why I'll continue to stick with Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS while this all blows over. It will blow over, however, and I'm happy to have a major player out there forcing it to happen.
- barnaby 16y ago
  We use Ubuntu LTS at work because of the stability. On my laptop at home though (which I only really use for watching movies, and for hacking on side-projects that one day may become HN stories) I'm always on cutting edge Ubuntu. I love the thrill of the beta's. So I'll do the dual strategy of letting it blow over for work purposes, and playing around in the mud for personal purposes.
  - lhnn 16y ago
    Where do you work? If you're allowed to say, I'm always interested in hearing about Linux deployments, much less Ubuntu and/or professional "desktop" Linux usage. There should be an Ubuntu testimonials website... Weekend project?

theclay 16y ago

God! I can hardly stand to read the digitizor website from all the crap they have jacked up and hyperlinked for advertising. I'm on Chrome. Is there a feature that lets you get control of that mess? Edit: I apologize for the off-topic posting, but the linked website is a good example of what readers of Hacker News seem to have tricks for handling.

cpach 16y ago
I recommend Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

naner 16y ago

This is the actual announcement by Shuttleworth: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

jamii 16y ago

I guess this means someone is going to have to port xmonad...

dfranke 16y ago
You mean all 2000 lines or so of the core that almost everything else is built on?
- thingie 16y ago
  Xmonad core doesn't provide any kind of X11 encapsulation and convenience interface, every single xmonad extension, any piece of configuration, can (and does) directly use X11, both API and behavior. After all, it's an X11 window manager. You have to rewrite everything.

maguay 16y ago

With the Software Center, Unity interface, and now a new display server, looks like Ubuntu is shooting for the mainstream OS business. Interesting to see an Linux distro trying so hard to set itself apart.

fhars 16y ago
Ubuntu has always been shooting for the mainstream, it is the central goal of the project. Just look at bug 1.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Link, for those that haven't seen it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
  - maguay 16y ago
    Thanks, I'd never seen that. Very humorous :) They should make another one: Bug #2: Apple has a majority mind-share

sielskr 16y ago

I've been unhappy with X since I learned enough (in the 90s) to have an opinion -- but not for the reason Shuttleworth gives: "We don’t believe X is setup to deliver the user experience we want, with super-smooth graphics and effects. I understand that it’s possible to get amazing results with X, but it’s extremely hard, and isn’t going to get easier. Some of the core goals of X make it harder to achieve these user experiences on X than on native GL" My unhappiness stems from my perception that the ways I have tried to customize X and things closely coupled to X (e.g., my window manager) have proved much more difficult (and in particular have forced me to contend with much more complexity) than they could have.

wmf 16y ago
In that case, I think you'll hate future Ubuntu because (like its mentor OS X) it won't be very configurable at all. Easy things will be easy and everything else will be impossible.
- hasenj 16y ago
  Except the code will be open so if Canonical doesn't make it configurable, other people can, and if they do it right without introducing unneeded complexity, their patches might just make it upstream (Ubuntu). This is assuming of course that people who like to fiddle with their display will stay with Ubuntu. Not many people like to do that anyway. But if there are people who want that kind of control, it's not impossible.

macco 16y ago

That is why I love Ubuntu: They like to take the bold decisions. Mark Shuttleworth is a small Version of Steve Jobs :)

utku_karatas2 16y ago
Let's say "open version".
- macco 16y ago
  Nice own. I met him personally. Totally incredable guy, who knows how to work with people.

hasenj 16y ago

This is great news for the Free Desktop. Ubuntu is really setting itself apart as its own OS rather than just another Linux distro. It might take about two years for this whole thing to sort of stabilize (Wayland + Unity), but when it does, Ubuntu will be kick-ass like it's never been before. I love it when people step outside the box.

nodata 16y ago
Wayland was started by someone at Red Hat.
- hasenj 16y ago
  It would be great to see Fedora using it too, but I don't know if that will happen. RHEL is not likely to use it, IMO, because it's not network-transparent. And f RHEL won't use it, Fedora probably won't use it. That said, what's setting Ubuntu apart is the fact they're moving away from the traditional stack (X -> GNOME). This is significant enough IMO. Other distros might follow, and in that case, there will be two kinda of distros: those that use X, and those that use Wayland.

Aegean 16y ago

For me X has always symbolized old, hard to configure, clunky, and ugly. It wasn't meant to be part of Unix but it mixed in. I am glad to see it go at least from our desktops.

nodata 16y ago
X has worked for years with no configuration. Not sure if symbolisation is important here, if it was, we'd just rename it.
beza1e1 16y ago
I found X quite easy to configure. Just set a few values in Xorg.conf and nowdays it even works without this sometimes. X11 as a protocol is old and mature like TCP or SMTP. Just like SMTP it has some problems, but Wayland throws away some core features to fix it. Hopefully, Wayland is flexible enough to get network transparency like X11 at some point.
- baq 16y ago
  >Just set a few values in Xorg.conf and nowdays it even works without this sometimes. you make it sound like it was an advantage.
nwmcsween 16y ago
Unix is old clunky and hard to configure. I could go far into details, I could even write a book on the subject and I have been using it since the early 90's because there is no alternative with traction.

known 16y ago

http://www.microxwin.com/architecture.html http://www.microxwin.com/architecture.html

cjtenny 16y ago

does this mean my hometown will fade into even greater obscurity (as quantified by google search results)? :( http://www.wayland.k12.ma.us/ http://www.wayland.k12.ma.us/

sedachv 16y ago

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html This is really stupid and I hope this project fails like all the other "let's replace X!!!" masturbation in the 00s. There is no evidence offered that involving the compositor in event handling is a performance problem in X (hint: like all the "X is slow because it is networked!" nonsense, it's probably not true). Even if that were true, this doesn't explain why the problem is better solved by starting from scratch rather than extending the Xcomposite extension. But hey, let's write a new graphics system! We can get wonderful advantages like: * Removing any hope of network transparency. After all, all I have is one computer and all I do with it is play videogames and watch porn. * Come up with a new API! Everyone appreciates having to rewrite their libraries and applications to new and incompatible specifications. * We need backwards-compatibility, so let's REIMPLEMENT ALL OF X! It will be really easy! And bug free! * Old computers? Who wants to use those? Obviously we're not going to implement drivers for older hardware. A tell-tale sign that this project is a dead-end is this statement: "rendering library such as OpenGL." OpenGL is not a rendering library, it's a specification. Just like the X protocol is a specification. If you don't understand why that's important, you shouldn't be trying to write a replacement for X. ----- Ok, nevermind the "no network transparency" part: "Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers." http://wayland.freedesktop.org/ http://wayland.freedesktop.org/ This actually looks somewhat reasonable. (I wanted to post this addendum as a reply instead of editing because the points above characterize why most of the 00s X-replacement projects failed, but HN won't let me) ------ Another edit. This time quoting the FAQ (https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/frequently-askeds-questions?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/f...): "It's a minimal server that lets clients communicate GEM buffers and information about updates to those buffers to a compositor." "Wayland doesn't get in the business of rendering, it expects the clients to use whatever means they prefer to render data into a GEM buffer and when it's done, inform the Wayland server of the new contents." "Because we for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models the Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option." "The problem with X is that... it's X." "No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients." This is actually as stupid as I originally thought. Now I really, really want it to fail.

zokier 16y ago

So the sound system is actually working again so lets break the display system next.

augustl 16y ago

I would just like to point out that Arch Linux with GNOME works just fine. I'm sure there are tons of other distros out there, too, that work just fine. If you don't like what's coming in Ubuntu, just switch. you probably won't notice much difference between ubuntu 10.10 and [insert distro] with GNOME.