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Network transparency is not a "crucial" feature. 90% of Linux desktop users do not use network transparency. The other 10% can (assuming Wayland is successful)

by naner 14y ago

Network transparency is not a "crucial" feature. 90% of Linux desktop users do not use network transparency. The other 10% can (assuming Wayland is successful) use Xorg, do without, or use VNC (yes, I know it is not the same thing).

bct 14y ago
> The other 10% can (assuming Wayland is successful) use Xorg... That's not very convincing. Assuming Wayland is successful, Xorg may vanish; that certainly seems to be what a lot of people are hoping.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  For Xorg to vanish every application that relies on it would have to be ported to Wayland, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - hollerith 14y ago
    if Emacs and either Google Chrome or Firefox get ported to Wayland and Wayland fixes some of the problems with X, then Wayland will have made my life better even if I still need X to run other applications.
agwa 14y ago
You can use the "only 10% of users use it" argument on so many features. That doesn't mean Linux shouldn't have it. That argument might fly with a commercial OS like Windows or Mac OS X, but some OS needs to provide a long tail of useful features for power users. You also have to weigh the utility of features. It may be that 90% of Linux desktop users would rather have fancy composting and a "cube effect" when doing fast user switching[1], but shouldn't network transparency win because it actually does something useful? [1] See "Is Wayland replacing the X Server?" on http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4 http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4
- bri3d 14y ago
  Much as you can run X within Wayland there's absolutely no reason why it's shouldn't be possible to build networking above Wayland. Even better, there's room for competing implementations - one could implement a framework which ships some sort of serialized OpenGL commands (client-side hardware rendering), fully rasterized windows (relying on the server's video hardware), or abstract primitives (like X). By providing a level of abstraction lower than that of X, Wayland provides a more flexible framework over which to implement whatever "long tail" of useful features the Linux community desires.
mattbriggs 14y ago
I think 10% is pretty generous. More like 0.005%, maybe.

by naner 14y ago

bct 14y ago

> The other 10% can (assuming Wayland is successful) use Xorg... That's not very convincing. Assuming Wayland is successful, Xorg may vanish; that certainly seems to be what a lot of people are hoping.

Symmetry 14y ago
For Xorg to vanish every application that relies on it would have to be ported to Wayland, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- hollerith 14y ago
  if Emacs and either Google Chrome or Firefox get ported to Wayland and Wayland fixes some of the problems with X, then Wayland will have made my life better even if I still need X to run other applications.

agwa 14y ago

You can use the "only 10% of users use it" argument on so many features. That doesn't mean Linux shouldn't have it. That argument might fly with a commercial OS like Windows or Mac OS X, but some OS needs to provide a long tail of useful features for power users. You also have to weigh the utility of features. It may be that 90% of Linux desktop users would rather have fancy composting and a "cube effect" when doing fast user switching[1], but shouldn't network transparency win because it actually does something useful? [1] See "Is Wayland replacing the X Server?" on http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4 http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_4

bri3d 14y ago
Much as you can run X within Wayland there's absolutely no reason why it's shouldn't be possible to build networking above Wayland. Even better, there's room for competing implementations - one could implement a framework which ships some sort of serialized OpenGL commands (client-side hardware rendering), fully rasterized windows (relying on the server's video hardware), or abstract primitives (like X). By providing a level of abstraction lower than that of X, Wayland provides a more flexible framework over which to implement whatever "long tail" of useful features the Linux community desires.

mattbriggs 14y ago

I think 10% is pretty generous. More like 0.005%, maybe.