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Also, even the limited X11 support which there currently is under Wayland will probably go the way of the dodo because it involves about the same amount of code

by makomk 7y ago

Also, even the limited X11 support which there currently is under Wayland will probably go the way of the dodo because it involves about the same amount of code as supporting X11 natively. For example, it requires every Wayland compositor to be a X window manager with all the complexity that implies, plus running a full hardware-accelerated X server and the OpenGL driver support for that. I can't imagine the desktop environments and distros who are so keen on dropping legacy features like X and support for 32-bit apps will keep all that code around for long. Once the integrated X support is gone you can't just replace it with a standalone X server of the sort that's available on OSes like Windows and Mac OS X either - by design, the standard Wayland API doesn't provide the functionality required to run X (or Windows) apps. In particular, it provides no way to set or get the absolute position of top-level windows, which apps on those platforms need to support things like menus. In a few years time, I can easily see modern Linux becoming the only current desktop OS that cannot run X apps.

the_why_of_y 7y ago
Xwayland doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver, because firstly, many of the features can be implemented by forwarding to the Wayland server, and secondly, the drawing operations (which don't exist in Wayland) have been implemented hardware independently, based on OpenGL, in the GLAMOR backend. https://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/ https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html If hardware vendors don't have to care about it, then Xwayland should not create a huge maintenance burden and thus I'm pretty confident it will be available until 2030; enterprise distros likely won't be able to remove it earlier anyway.
- makomk 7y ago
  X doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver either when running on hardware supported by Wayland+Xwayland. The GLAMOR backend works just as well for a standalone X server, and it can just use the same libraries and APIs as Wayland does for the rest of the stuff. (There's not really any kind of hardware abstraction layer in Wayland itself.) The main reason why people use the hardware specific X drivers still is because they're more mature and robust than the Wayland stuff.
- bitwize 7y ago
  Maintaining Xwayland basically means maintaining all of Xorg except the hardware-specific drivers. And Red Hat doesn't want to maintain that code base anymore. Therefore, Xwayland will soon be abandoned, then deprecated, then removed entirely.

by makomk 7y ago

the_why_of_y 7y ago

Xwayland doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver, because firstly, many of the features can be implemented by forwarding to the Wayland server, and secondly, the drawing operations (which don't exist in Wayland) have been implemented hardware independently, based on OpenGL, in the GLAMOR backend. https://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/ https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html If hardware vendors don't have to care about it, then Xwayland should not create a huge maintenance burden and thus I'm pretty confident it will be available until 2030; enterprise distros likely won't be able to remove it earlier anyway.

makomk 7y ago
X doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver either when running on hardware supported by Wayland+Xwayland. The GLAMOR backend works just as well for a standalone X server, and it can just use the same libraries and APIs as Wayland does for the rest of the stuff. (There's not really any kind of hardware abstraction layer in Wayland itself.) The main reason why people use the hardware specific X drivers still is because they're more mature and robust than the Wayland stuff.
bitwize 7y ago
Maintaining Xwayland basically means maintaining all of Xorg except the hardware-specific drivers. And Red Hat doesn't want to maintain that code base anymore. Therefore, Xwayland will soon be abandoned, then deprecated, then removed entirely.