Does The Display Server Matter? The Latest Mir vs. Wayland Argument

[bison]

Phoronix: Does The Display Server Matter? The Latest Mir vs. Wayland Argument

The latest argument within the open-source camp is whether the choice of the display server is still relevant in modern times of the Linux desktop, given the advancements of tool-kits and other components. Alas, it's another Mir vs. Wayland battle...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY0MTM

From Martin's response:

In summary: Canonical created a huge problem by introducing another Display Server and it?s affecting all of us and they are still in denial state.

I'm not sure who "all of us" is supposed to be, but this comment displays enormous levels of arrogance and entitlement. Are the rest of us supposed to check with "all of us" before starting a new software project? Do we need to get permission to proceed? Do Wayland developers, or KDE developers -- or any other arbitrary group of developers -- have exclusive rights to dictate how software will be written for Linux-based operating systems, or for any other operating system?

I think not.

[seba]

Hmm after reading Martin blog post seems like most of his issues are problems with the toolkit than having two display servers :-)

[jrch2k8]

From Martin's response:



I'm not sure who "all of us" is supposed to be, but this comment displays enormous levels of arrogance and entitlement. Are the rest of us supposed to check with "all of us" before starting a new software project? Do we need to get permission to proceed? Do Wayland developers, or KDE developers -- or any other arbitrary group of developers -- have exclusive rights to dictate how software will be written for Linux-based operating systems, or for any other operating system?

I think not.

you can propose and nurture any alternative you want and you use it as you want it until it grows enough to be accepted and supported for others than you but wait until everybody got a design in such important of a system to brute force your code that nor provide or improve anything about the agreed design path in everyone throat because you believe you have enough weight to pull it of, is another thing.

so Canonical have the exclusive right to shove to anyones throat any code they want and force it to be accepted for no reason other than canonical wanted it? even when the entire community agreed in a path that canonical isnt improving in any meaningful way?

[bison]

you can propose and nurture any alternative you want and you use it as you want it until it grows enough to be accepted and supported for others than you but wait until everybody got a design in such important of a system to brute force your code that nor provide or improve anything about the agreed design path in everyone throat because you believe you have enough weight to pull it of, is another thing.

so Canonical have the exclusive right to shove to anyones throat any code they want and force it to be accepted for no reason other than canonical wanted it? even when the entire community agreed in a path that canonical isnt improving in any meaningful way?

Canonical doesn't have the ability to do that, so the point is moot.

And the "entire community" has never agreed to anything, and never will, unless you redefine "the community" to exclude people with whom you disagree.

[jrch2k8]

Canonical doesn't have the ability to do that, so the point is moot.

And the "entire community" has never agreed to anything, and never will, unless you redefine "the community" to exclude people with whom you disagree.

well FOSS dev comunity means the developers/packagers/distro representatives/bussiness/foundations/contributing individuals and the like not every living been in the universe as those are user communities and those are not related to the development process due to the lack of knowledge in technical matters.

everyone here refers as comunity the FOSS dev community not the user communities for ovbious reasons

[Gusar]

And the "entire community" has never agreed to anything

That is completely false. They have agreed on dbus (KDE dropped their in-house dcop for it, for example), they have agreed on systemd (there are a few outliers, mostly Slackware and Gentoo, but Gentoo is working on making systemd a first class citizen on the same level as OpenRC, and even Canonical decided to transition from upstart to systemd). And they have agreed on Wayland. That's just a few examples, I doubt they're the only ones.

And by "they" I mean the people who actually write the code. Which is important, first and foremost you need buy-in from them, because without them there is nothing for the users to use. In the case of Wayland, "they" is driver developers, toolkit developers, DE developers. They all agreed to move in the same direction and have been working for quite some time to make Wayland happen. There is a phone out there that uses Wayland by default already - the Jolla. But then came Canonical and announced their project that they have been working on behind closed doors for nine months, and they seemed to just expect everyone to be on board with it. Well, not so fast. Canonical is not getting buy-in for Mir, and with good reason.

[Delgarde]

Applications (outside of a limited set of corner cases) should be agnostic to the underlying display server[/b]

Agreed, but "should be" isn't the same thing as "are", and that was Martin's point. Toolkits can't abstract away all the differences - at best they might perfectly hide the underlying APIs, but you still get all those niche cases - features available on one platform but not the other, etc. Which means that the application code may not care about the display server, as such, but it does need to care about whether particular features are available on that server. Lots of extra complexity, extra code paths, extra testing required... all for no real benefit.

[TheBlackCat]

I'm not sure who "all of us" is supposed to be, but this comment displays enormous levels of arrogance and entitlement. Are the rest of us supposed to check with "all of us" before starting a new software project? Do we need to get permission to proceed? Do Wayland developers, or KDE developers -- or any other arbitrary group of developers -- have exclusive rights to dictate how software will be written for Linux-based operating systems, or for any other operating system?

I think not.

There is no entitlement. Canonical made a decision. They are free to do that. Martin never says otherwise. However, those decisions have consequences. Pointing out those consequences, and pointing out that Canonical is trying to downplay them, is not "entitlement".

If you disagree with his analysis of the consequences, feel free to point out the mistakes. But I don't see how merely explaining the flaws in Canonical's assessment of the effects of their decision could possibly be considered "entitlement".

[Vim_User]

I certainly will not accept patches for the frameworks and applications I maintain.

So now he switched from "I will not support this if it is only used in one distro" to "I will not support it just because!"?
Way to undermine his own integrity, seriously.

[valeriodean]

well after testing ubuntu unity 8 snapshot + ubuntu on my nexus and wayland in gnome 3.12, i can say for sure Mir is at least a year(if developed full steam ahead) from wayland state today. So far Mir is less performant, is not very stable(with intel it crashes a lot and with the nexus 4 too) and they havent reached perfect frames synchronization(some animation have very wierd behaviors specially under load). On the other side Wayland is impressive specially with radeonsi/r600g and pretty rock solid so far(mutter was a bit unstable at the begining of the 3.11 cycle) but it misses few key points tho like full gdm session and accelerated Xwayland without glamorwl-git or xwayland flash crash on firefox(chrome pepper seems to work just fine in v.33 -- havent tested aura-wayland tree).

i tested MPV on wayland too and is perfect absolutely perfect even on 40GB bluray high bitrate scenes(big kudos for MPV devs) btw Qt5 on wayland is quite a beast too already for normal apps, especially the canvas intensive type, with wayland is almost free and QML animation are butter smooth(haven't tested KF5 yet tho).

i havent tested touch/tablet input since i don't use them and epiphany is quite impresive rendering on wayland even tho i don't love it as a browser interface i have to admit is even more fluid than safari on OS X in page render, scrolling and fluidity.

another thing i did is use the gallium hud and process memory tracking and i have to admit run as wayland client is almost RAM free(in fact you shave around 100M of ram usage from X backend just like that) and the hud barely do anything to render a full wayland desktop like gnome 3.12(ofc all this test are not representative of anything but my own system and are not intended to be used as proof of anything beyond inspire you to do your own test on your own system or pick michael curiosity )

Btw color correction is quite good already(for my eyes) maybe an graphic expert could compare it to OS X for fun

in conclusion i dont mean to demerit Mir but to point is needed more time to reach wayland current state since they still are quite behind

Thank you. It's the most interesting post so far.