How Important Is The Wayland Display Server?

[RealNC]

'clutter backend'? why not add gvfs and pulseaudio crap too!

seriously, why do some devs think it is ok to infest EVERYTHING with gnome?

Because the devs use Gnome?

[V!NCENT]

What is this crap about PulseAudio eing crap? It rules as long as there are PulseAudio apps.

Here's the ultimate OS I would like to have that will destroy, crush, demolish, everything out there to oblivion:

-Coreboot (should be part of an OS);
-Superfast Plymouth with smooth transitions to Wayland and KDE;
-Gallium3D
-Wayland with Qt (wasn't Nokia interested in making Qt compatible with Wayland?)
-KDE4.x. Seriously get rid of Gnome and make it widgets on the Plasma desktop!
-Proper PulseAudio
-Wine
-Iron (that's Goolge Chrome stripped from E.T.) with adblock and no-script
-OpenCL realtime ray tracing library and games
-Proper HAL
-Latest GCC, G++ and a graphical frontend for it
-USB HID
-Shitload of drivers
-D-bus
-SELinux
-Kdenlive
-PIM
-KMyMoney
-Qt app for managing and syncing all your sosial networks
-Kopete with webcam support and on-the-fly custom emoticons adding
-AmaroK
-OO.o base with Qt frontend
-QT media centre app
-Qt backup app
-Vlc pluging for Iron
-Proper Gnash
-Wicd as a backend for the KNetworkManager
-All kinds of other apps
-Let all the above work together by Freedesktop.org
-Focus more on speed and out-featuring Mac OS X

Sadly though; not gonna happen

[onicsis]

Interesting ideeas in this disscusion about X and Win Vista/7

http://www.osnews.com/story/21999/Editorial_X_Could_Learn_a_Lot_from_Vista_Windows_7

http://www.osnews.com/comments/21999

[Ze..]

X11's on-the-wire deficiencies are documented and will be handled when X12 work starts. However, X12 work will not start until all other major architectural problems have been addressed.

Whilst I've used X11's networking functionality regularly in the past , there are alternative approaches that rely on diffing,compression and caching that seem to be quite attractive from a graphical standpoint.

That said, I think the Wayland *project* is important, just not in the way that Allen suggests. Wayland does not need to "replace X" in order to be a valuable effort - and IMO the "Wayland vs X battle" is a huge mistake for all involved, unless we feel that all of the key applications used on Linux/Unix systems today can be painlessly ported to native Wayland in (say) six months with available resources. The use of standardized toolkits can help a lot with recent apps and desktop environments, but AFAIK a lot of key apps are *not* written over one of the core toolkits and so realistically coexistence between X and Wayland is the important thing to discuss, not one being victorious over the other.

When people talk about X they confuse a lot of desktop and hardware issues.

Personally I feel that all the seperate toolkits reimplementing the underlying widgets and services is part of the problem. Toolkits should be a different perspective for programmers but they should use native widgets and services. Wayland is an attempt to fix this problem by each application doing whatever drawing it wants to a buffer and putting it all in the hands of the toolkits , rather than trying to create a new toolkit that is the base for others.

The desktop has a lot of problems that stem from people re-inventing the wheel in their own layer instead of extending other things (like gvfs instead of implementing them in fuse/kernel). IMHO a microkernal approach would allow a saner separation and integration of services that tends more towards the unix and it's descendants model. However we have trouble getting devs to change to c++ instead of c with macro hacks (thanks to c++ compiler support in the past).

Realistically though any replacement for X will still have X translation layer for legacy applications to aid the transition.

[nanonyme]

Realistically though any replacement for X will still have X translation layer for legacy applications to aid the transition.

Maybe we'll end up with something like Aqua with this approach. Not necessarily bad but still. The network functionality might be able to be done by doing an X server like the one that OSX and Windows have, as in it would run inside (as a window or a full-screen application) the native GUI that in our case would be Wayland.

[pabloski]

I don't think Quartz is something to be proud of. Apple did a lot of optimization, but Quartz and in general Mac OS is the biggest peace of absurd code, a big collage of thousands of distinct elements.

But they have refined it over the years and resolved all the problems with 2d/3d conflicts, video/3d conflicts, etc....

It is possibile to do the same thing in X, but why? X is changing a lot, so it is best to concentrate on kms/dri2/gallium/the new X that will result from all this.

[89c51]

just out of curiosity how many apps on the average desktop "need" the network stuff that X offers???


or in other words how many apps require it in order to run properly


and is it so importand for the average user?

[bridgman]

It's not the network extensibility we're talking about, just the API. Programming an app for Wayland is different from programming it for X, although if the app was written over a heavily used toolkit (ie one which is likely to get ported) that would certainly help.

[89c51]

It's not the network extensibility we're talking about, just the API. Programming an app for Wayland is different from programming it for X, although if the app was written over a heavily used toolkit (ie one which is likely to get ported) that would certainly help.

but wayland afaik never intended to have apps writen directly to it (and i think most app now just render on X because the toolkit has this functionality)

i just wanted to know how important is the functionality we have in X for the average user

as far as i understand the whole thing as soon as we get QT and GTK (or any other toolkit) ported the average user will not be able to tell what he is using

thats how i understand the whole thing and i might be very wrong

[suokko]

but wayland afaik never intended to have apps writen directly to it (and i think most app now just render on X because the toolkit has this functionality)

i just wanted to know how important is the functionality we have in X for the average user

as far as i understand the whole thing as soon as we get QT and GTK (or any other toolkit) ported the average user will not be able to tell what he is using

thats how i understand the whole thing and i might be very wrong

Remote X is useful when ever you want to run the application in remote machine. Idea behind X is that you can run the application anywhere and have it draw to your local X server. GLX provides same functionality for OpenGL.