The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland

[liam]

What will happen to the several less frequently used X extensions in XWayland?
I'm especially thinking of stuff like Xtest or Xrecord. Will stuff like that still work in XWayland? I imagine that this is not possible, because the X client can't "break out of its virtual X server"?

Also, right now it is possible to - in addition to using Xtest - send custom X events via XSendEvent() to other clients. I guess it will not be possible to send e.g. key events from Xwayland to a real wayland client, right? Or from an XWayland client to another XWayland client?

Asking this because I'm developing Robotux, which is a macro recorder that heavily relies on this functionality.
I think a complete rewrite will be required to get this running on wayland, right?
And then again, will it be possible to inject input events the other way round (i.e. sending events from Wayland to an xWayland client)?

Thanks

That looks a BIT like apple's automator. IMHO, automator might be the very best feature on osx, and is something I've long wanted to see on linux.

[frign]

You're right about some of those, but the last two were actually mostly correct as they were in the article. "No matter the system load" is fine by itself (not necessary to emphasise high load, as the point is that it works perfectly no matter what the load is, high or low). Many commas that you have added are also completely unnecessary (English is a very liberal language when it comes to punctuation, to the point where you can create complex sentences without any punctuation). In fact, a comma after "things" makes no sense whatsoever, and you don't put commas before "and" unless it's to end a subordinate clause or connect two different clauses. "Break things all they want" is also valid, "all they want" is a phrase and "break things" is valid on its own. "it's THEM who has to deal with the fallout" is wrong in both cases, it should be "it's THEY who have to deal with the fallout". "Of that breakage", while not the nicest way to put it, is still valid. "I'm sure some people saw that the Rasberry Pi got a Wayland specific backend" is correct, because "got" means the same as "received", and it's referring to a specific action in the past.

Thanks for the response . I completely agree with you and took note of the corrections you gave, as I myself am still learning the English language.
One thing though needs to be cleared up: The commas in round brackets are the ones I marked to be removed. We Germans are pretty strong on punctuation and tend to bring it into the English language, thus, creating those complex structures with less punctuation is definitely an interesting thing and a new concept for most of us.

[Skrapion]

He said DWM... like desktop window manager...
Everything else is pretty much right, but not related to the question, which was already answered by other user.

EDIT: Except for the thing about Win32 API, which is actually the answer given. One does not target DWM or whatever it was the underlying infrastructure before, but Win32 API. And when something gets deprecated, there are still compatibility layers, similar to what xwayland does.

He also asked about WDM, but maybe it was a typo.

[mrugiero]

He also asked about WDM, but maybe it was a typo.

Then I didn't pay enough attention to the post. I think it must have been a typo, though, because of the context.

[garegin]

By targeting the win32 toolkit, which was updated in vista (and every other windows version).

Microsoft just does that porting as part of the OS rather than having a 3rd party toolkit. And they spend a lot of money to make sure it's mostly backwards compatible.

so the equivalent would be gtk being backwards compatible and handling x and wayland applications transparently? or is the windows way substantially different.

[rdnetto]

SystemD Comparison

Thanks for the great article!

I'll second the interest in a systemd comparison, esp. if it includes OpenRC (Sabayon user here).

[Candide]

systemd / SysV / Upstart comparison

Question for everyone else: Would you guys be interested in a systemd / SysV / Upstart comparison as well? I was toying around with the idea in my head, hadn't made up my mind yet.

I know that I certainly would be. Not just to judge the performance (boot itmes) of these three competitors, but to understand what they can do for stability and security.

Thanks for asking Eric.

[danielbot]

The story on network transparency is still unsatisfying

Basically, the story from the Wayland team remains "we already broke network transparency in X so we will just forget about it entirely in Wayland". Sorry, lots of folks are going to keep hating until the network transparency story changes to "yes we agree that network transparency is one of the main reasons people love X and this is how we're going to do it in Wayland."

[NaNaNa]

Basically, the story from the Wayland team remains "we already broke network transparency in X so we will just forget about it entirely in Wayland".

That's incorrect -- they are just saying that there's no need to make it part of the core protocol. Which is demonstrably true since IIRC there's already a proof of concept implementation of remoting.

[TheBlackCat]

Sounds like a window manager to me. I suppose it could do less than a full window manager, and then a full window manager could plug into a compositor... but it also sounds quite roundabout. From what I can tell, window managers should already have the capabilities needed to be a compositor.

No, a window manager manages windows. A compositor manages images. Windows are not images, and images are not windows. Traditional window managers are not compositors and have none of what is needed to be a compositor, since they have no capability to combine different images. The actual rendering of the completed windows and the full desktop was handled by X11, the window manager just made sure the windows were in the right place and handled their decorations.

kwin, for example, includes separate window management and compositor components, and the two can be run independently (for example you can run kwin with compiz as its compositor).

A specific example may be helpful: Let's say you have firefox open. What size is the firefox window? What is its shape? Is it minimized? These are all things that are decided by the window manager. This information is then handed firefox, which uses it to decide what sort of image it will render (if any). This image is then handed to the compositor, which combines it with other images provided by other windows. The compositor then combines these images together to create one big image. This is then handed to the hardware to display. As you can see, these are completely different tasks, and there is no reason one program needs to, or even should, handle both.