Wayland/Weston 0.95 Land In Ubuntu 12.10

[hiryu]

ugh

I don't understand all the anti-Wayland hate out there. There's some issues that I see (that I'll get to below), but overall it's progress we need. At first, I wasn't sold on wayland, but lets face it, bolting compositing on top of X hasn't worked so well. I boot into windows 7 (less than once a week), and it's clear how much more smooth the compositing is there. Look at the diagrams of how compositing works in X and you'll start to see why things don't run as fast and smooth as they should. I have a core i7 980x, a GTX580, 18GB of memory and an SSD (well, /home is on a 2TB RAID1 array on a 3ware 9750 SATA III controller), and I can't hit anywhere close to a stable 60 fps on my desktop, it's ridiculous. At least my desktop in Linux is snapper, even if it's choppy.

The Wayland architecture should give us a significant and much needed speed boost. It matches up with how modern hardware works, and removes a lot of the unnecessary middlemen inside of the X architecture. I am a bit concerned that some dists may end up trying to push wayland before it's truly ready for prime-time (and/or perhaps before xwayland is also ready). Should this happen, those distributions will end up bleeding users pretty badly and therefore the problem will solve itself.

Here's my problems with wayland:
1. Remoting really isn't being built-in, but will potentially tacked on later. Remoting is awesome, and I think we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. Presently, the idea to get remoting in Wayland is to write a compositor that takes the buffers for the windows, and sends them over the network to some remote machine. Not knowing Wayland's architecture too well, will this allow for sharing of individual windows (hacks where the entire desktop is still running on the original machine doesn't count)? The other problem that the the remote machine now must handle drawing the windows instead of the machine with the display. In X, the machine with the display (the server) does the drawing which puts less load on the remote client machine (imagine when a remote machine has to draw for several clients, you can see how this could become a problem). Wayland windows are all drawn via GPU too, correct? This means the remote machine sending the windows over the network would also have to have a GPU powerful enough to handle all of the drawing now.

But maybe this point isn't such a big deal. Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm a big fan of constructive criticism), but my understanding is that the way things are currently done is X is that the toolkits handle all the drawing themselves, not using any of the obsolete X.org drawing commands, then just send/copy all the pixels to the X server (whether the X server is on the local machine or not). This would mean the drawing is already being done on the client machine in X anyway so the Wayland approach to remoting wouldn't really change much here.

2. Are the Wayland devs still locking things to the refresh rate of the monitor? For most people, 60 fps is fine, but there may be cases where this is not sufficient. I know this has been debated on this forum in the past, but there are times when the latency from 60 fps may be too high (especially when you add this to the latency of the monitor). How do I know? I own an arcade where we regularly throw tournaments. We have some professional players come in (and even occasionally some semi-big ones, but I won't drop any names), and latency is a big concern of their's. My business partner and I were aware of the issue before we even opened the business so we've never had any issues, but this has been a problem in some other big tournaments (we're small fries) where they had to replace the monitors during the event (I believe this might've even happened at Evo once years ago). In fighting games, timing is everything. In FPS games, accuracy is everything. Latency at this level may not be an issue for us mere mortals, but it comes to the tournament players, this matters.

Then there's the issue of when the framerate can't keep up with the refresh rate... What if the framerate dips to 59? Well, you're not going to see 59 fps, it's going to drop to something like 30 or 45 fps to sync up with the monitor which can jarring and ugly (but is at least still tear-free). For the desktop in general, this tradeoff is clearly worth it. But for a game, having the ability to enable or disable vsync is pretty important. Hopefully applications will be able to support enabling and disabling vsync on an individualistic basis at least eventually.

[AJSB]

p.s. Please, use Slackware if you don't like changes, I haven't never read of doctors recommending Ubuntu.

What are you mumbling about ? *IF* i wanted PulseAudio, as an example, i also can have it in Slackware.

Here is the package:

http://www.slacky.eu/asche/pkgs/index.php?sear=pulseaudio

SO, in Slackware, WE have a choice....i bet that in a maximum of 3 (maybe 2) years you won't have a choice in UBUNTU.

As for xWayland , we all know that will be only an interim solution, it will be dropped real fast by Wayland devs...


...and BTW....is LP one of the Wayland devs ?

[ChrisXY]

Progress is fine. Breaking my stuff in the name of progress is not! This is why I hate them forcing this Wayland bulls***. We will have to use it and then find out half the applications either don't work or are seriously crippled. And then the wayland devs won't accept that they are idiots, they will blame the applications for not being compatible with them and not following their "rules".

Can you name one application that you know for a fact will not work when wayland becomes the unalterable default in ubuntu?

[freedam]

Applications don't run just because the ports are not complete yet, they will not ship crippled applications. The first use for Wayland will be with XWayland, you'll have your Xorg desktop unaltered until there isn't a viable alternative.

p.s. Please, use Slackware if you don't like changes, I haven't never read of doctors recommending Ubuntu.

[Teho]

These things start always in the same way....ALWAYS....1st you have a choice to use it or not then it's imposed on you and will be a nightmare to try to get rid of it if not impossible....and UBUNTU is one of the "best" distro examples of precisely that.

Well currently there's no choise in Linux desktop when it comes to display servers and many applications are hardcoded to use X.org. Now thanks to Wayland that is about to change. For example both Qt 5 and GTK+ 3 support changing the backeds on runtime. This also means that in the future it will be easier to add support for more platforms if needed. If I'm not mistaken only few applications have to add any Wayland specific code so it will not lock up applications to itself. Of course the toolkits will probably drop their X.org backends at somepoint in the future but it will take years. I fail to see how getting rid of X.org in a long term can be seen as anything but a good thing.

No need to create it....there is already one...

Damn I wish people would stop trolling every forum with their anti-progress bullshit and just move to Slackware. One can only hope...

[mark45]

Oh God the end is nigh. No they're not forcing it down our throats, noooo, I was wrong see? That's why even if not useful they're still putting it in the distro. Because they're not forcing anything upon us. Probably when it'll hit 1.0 they'll remove x completely and force all of us to become wayland's bitches.

The peanut gallery was advised to shut up because besides angry rants and FUD it doesn't produce anything.

[AJSB]

I seriously don't see your problem: What do you have against choice in the repositories?

The problem is that there is NO choice at all.


YEAH, you read it right !

These things start always in the same way....ALWAYS....1st you have a choice to use it or not then it's imposed on you and will be a nightmare to try to get rid of it if not impossible....and UBUNTU is one of the "best" distro examples of precisely that.

[AJSB]

I haven't seen anyone stopping you from creating a distro from scratch that will use all the good old trouble free "techs" X sysVinit pure alsa. etc

No need to create it....there is already one...

[ChrisXY]

Yet. It's not default yet. Just you wait

I seriously don't see your problem: What do you have against choice in the repositories?

[AJenbo]

Oh God the end is nigh. No they're not forcing it down our throats, noooo, I was wrong see? That's why even if not useful they're still putting it in the distro. Because they're not forcing anything upon us. Probably when it'll hit 1.0 they'll remove x completely and force all of us to become wayland's bitches.

Its not installed by default, by your logic they are also forcing you to play open arena. Not to mention X witch is actually the default.