Two Features Wayland Will Have That X Doesn't

[3vi1]

>> This is all good news for gamers when hopefully running Wayland within a few years time and also for other applications like Wine.

Until nVidia changes their mind about supporting Wayland in their binary drivers, or the Nouveau drivers make significant improvements, I doubt any Wine users (primarily gamers) give a damn about Wayland.

[BlackStar]

The second item in the news post pretty much fixes every single issue I have with X11/xlib.

Bring it on!

[mirv]

I see people falling for hype again. Nothing has been done, it was just some ideas floated around. Nothing that's been said here can't be done with X - and might well be done eventually with X as well.

[Kazade]

>> This is all good news for gamers when hopefully running Wayland within a few years time and also for other applications like Wine.

Until nVidia changes their mind about supporting Wayland in their binary drivers, or the Nouveau drivers make significant improvements, I doubt any Wine users (primarily gamers) give a damn about Wayland.

It's early days. If it looks like there is going to be a massive shift from X to Wayland across Linux distros then Nvidia will develop drivers for it.

[d4ddi0]

Well, one thing that has to be said is:
If Wayland devs can solve these problems for their display server, Xorg will benefit from the knowledge, and in some cases, directly benefit from the code.

X's egl support basically came from Wayland (IIRC). I suspect it won't be the last thing, as long as Wayland is actively hacked on.

[allquixotic]

I don't think any open source 3d stack will be able to come even remotely close to the performance of the proprietary drivers, so unless Wayland is thinking of supporting an alternate rendering path not based on KMS and GEM (the KMS symbols are GPL'ed and therefore cannot legally be used by Nvidia/ATI binary drivers no matter how badly they want to use them), there will be no meaningful gaming on Wayland. Maybe the best of the best open source drivers may be able to run a native port of OpenArena to Wayland in 2015. But something with actual fragment shaders? Forget it.

[V!NCENT]

X.org is only still useful for the internet. An AMD 6800 has a 1GB framebuffer, for which you won't use all of it (not even 1/30) and with a GB LAN port and cables, this is totally neglect-able. You can simply transfer the raw framebuffer image over a gigabyte ethernet cable.

X.org was only invented for LAN anyway.

Wayland solves all problems with X.org, namely the fact that it starts from scratch 20 years later. X.org may be perfectly fine, but the effort and thus time it takes for it to transform to something modern, while staying in a working state with the nVidia blob, is just realy big.

Letting X.org bitrot for the blobs and having Wayland for the FLOSS drivers is just epic.

And let's face it; you directly use the Xserver all the time anyway, and partly the client when on remote.

That's 100% of the time slower than Wayland and 100%>time speedup.
Wayland is 100% of the time faster than X.org on the client side and 100%>time slowdown on remote.

Logical breakdown?

[curaga]

@allquixotic

Actual fragment shaders? What do you think OA's bloom effect uses?

[jbrown96]

X.org is only still useful for the internet. An AMD 6800 has a 1GB framebuffer, for which you won't use all of it (not even 1/30) and with a GB LAN port and cables, this is totally neglect-able. You can simply transfer the raw framebuffer image over a gigabyte ethernet cable.

X.org was only invented for LAN anyway.

Wayland solves all problems with X.org, namely the fact that it starts from scratch 20 years later. X.org may be perfectly fine, but the effort and thus time it takes for it to transform to something modern, while staying in a working state with the nVidia blob, is just realy big.

Letting X.org bitrot for the blobs and having Wayland for the FLOSS drivers is just epic.

And let's face it; you directly use the Xserver all the time anyway, and partly the client when on remote.

That's 100% of the time slower than Wayland and 100%>time speedup.
Wayland is 100% of the time faster than X.org on the client side and 100%>time slowdown on remote.

Logical breakdown?

There is no reason to believe that Wayland will be better because the code is newer. There is no reason to believe that Wayland will perform better because it doesn't contain network pathways.

Wayland is largely vaporware right now. It doesn't exist in a way that can be compared to Xorg.

************************************
Let's think pragmatically for a minute. The main appeal of Wayland seems to be for performance reasons. Let's assume that Wayland does have a reasonable performance benefit, which I find highly doubtful. As allquixotic points out, proprietary drivers won't be able to use Wayland without major changes. Therefore, open source graphics drivers are a requirement for Wayland. But by using open source drivers, you're sacrificing way more performance than Xorg ever caused. People that care about performance -- like gamers -- will continue to use Xorg + fglrx V nvidia.
I do believe that the open source drivers will aggressively develop new features and improve stability, but they won't be able to match the performance of the proprietary drivers, ever.
That really leaves us with the question of who cares about Wayland. People that care about a fully open source system will, but I doubt that they care about performance anyways.
Wayland isn't a pragmatic approach in any category, but then again, FOSS supports don't tend to be pragmatic...

[bac0n]

There is no reason to believe that Wayland will be better because the code is newer. There is no reason to believe that Wayland will perform better because it doesn't contain network pathways.

Wayland is largely vaporware right now. It doesn't exist in a way that can be compared to Xorg.

************************************
Let's think pragmatically for a minute. The main appeal of Wayland seems to be for performance reasons. Let's assume that Wayland does have a reasonable performance benefit, which I find highly doubtful. As allquixotic points out, proprietary drivers won't be able to use Wayland without major changes. Therefore, open source graphics drivers are a requirement for Wayland. But by using open source drivers, you're sacrificing way more performance than Xorg ever caused. People that care about performance -- like gamers -- will continue to use Xorg + fglrx V nvidia.
I do believe that the open source drivers will aggressively develop new features and improve stability, but they won't be able to match the performance of the proprietary drivers, ever.
That really leaves us with the question of who cares about Wayland. People that care about a fully open source system will, but I doubt that they care about performance anyways.
Wayland isn't a pragmatic approach in any category, but then again, FOSS supports don't tend to be pragmatic...

Why want open source drivers not match proprietary driver... eventually?