Drafting Plans For X12, The X11 Successor

[smitty3268]

Excellent point. Those of us who have become accustomed to network transparency and who benefit from it always have difficulty explaining it to people who have never used it and who don't understand its value.

Network transparency is a neat feature, but what does it actually provide to the user that something like RDP or VNC doesn't? You can call those gross hacks if you want, but the bottom line is that all the actual X developers have said that it's a poor architecture and that RDP is far superior. I trust that they know what they are talking about far more than some random posters on Phoronix, unless you can actually articulate what it is that we lose.

[V!NCENT]

Excellent point. Those of us who have become accustomed to network transparency and who benefit from it always have difficulty explaining it to people who have never used it and who don't understand its value.

I think nobody here has a problem with network transparency. The problem is that before Wayland nobody had a choice but to use X.org.

I don't do networking, so I don't care. Therefore I'm wondering why it is that when I resize my windows it's a total lag fest. Meanwhile, I'm being angered by the fact that the Wine project can't even fix a stupid mouse bug related to X.org, because X11 is not supporting it >.< And how about fullscreen.

Everytime I read something about X.org; it isn't pretty. That doesn't mean we don't like to have network transparency, we just don't like X.org network transparency.

[Remote User]

The fact that X11 is outdated and has serious flaws today is not an argument against network transparency.

Excellent point. Those of us who have become accustomed to network transparency and who benefit from it always have difficulty explaining it to people who have never used it and who don't understand its value.

[V!NCENT]

Hrm...

You guys do realize that X11 is just a network protocol?

Yes.

Arguing over Xlib vs Wayland or whatever other insanity is entirely besides the point.

No it's exactly the point. You have to program for X.org if you want a GUI in Linux because X.org is the only GUI in Linux.

The problem is, is that the X11 legacy crap is hurtin X.org in thousands of ways and people just want to abandon the extreme latency of X.org by removing Xlib and having their shit run directly from widget toolkits. Try to resize a Window and then... aha!

But then people like to have X11 around and think that Wayland is screwing with their desires, while it's perfectly possible and needed to approach stuff in a different way than the X11 way.

You X server is just a 'browser' for X11 nework protocol. Ideally, Wayland can support X11 or X12 or whatever pretty much as well as your XServer can. (and it already supports X11)

Wayland has its own networking API. The 'problem' is that it's not stable and changing all the time, so no networkeable apps can be made for it.

[drag]

Hrm...

You guys do realize that X11 is just a network protocol?
It's like http or ftp.

Arguing over Xlib vs Wayland or whatever other insanity is entirely besides the point. It's like saying that the Firefox web browser is better then HTML because Internet Explorer sucks. It really doesn't make any sense.

Xlib is just old C bindings for X11. It's not X11.

You X server is just a 'browser' for X11 nework protocol. Ideally, Wayland can support X11 or X12 or whatever pretty much as well as your XServer can. (and it already supports X11)

What people really hate about Wayland is that you do NOT have to use X11 to program for it. You can use, theoretically, all sorts of APIs. X11 is just one of them you can use. They are, for whatever reason, are scared that their network transparency is disappearing or whatever unless all application developers are forced to use stuff they really do not want to use if given a chance.

It's really all quite silly.

If X12 is going to kick-ass, and network transparency is really valuable and is demanded by users then it's going to be used regardless if your using Wayland or not.

[V!NCENT]

We are in the Linux world right now. It's not allowed to say that Microsoft is doing something well .

Ah yes... er-... We don't need this bandwith rape, because the commandline is ten trillion times more powerful and FUSE is already killing... er-... That Exchange shit!

[BlackStar]

The most interesting part is and remains 2D graphics. At the moment there is a standardized stream format for those: I can start an X11 server almost anywhere, and it will be able to display near enough every X11 app. If we move to per-toolkit network transparency, it certainly sounds like this goes away, to be replaced by separate packages to install locally for every toolkit I want to forward. (Not to mention the niggly little things like if they'll be version sensitive, and how they'll want the network set up).

Nope. Modern applications already use those graphics toolkits rather than X drawing commands. Those nice subpixel anti-aliased fonts in your browser? They are not rendered through X, they are sent to it as little pre-rendered pixmaps. Those pretty anti-aliased 2d graphics? Same thing. 3d graphics? Again.

Modern applications have already relegated X network transparency to sending pre-rendered bitmaps over the wire. And guess what, VNC is more efficient sending bitmaps than X (and even more efficient protocols are already available).

Wayland doesn't really change anything. You can still run an X server or a VNC server on top of it - the only difference is that you'll get better performance and more robust applications.

Edit: btw, what was the last plain X app you used? For me, it was Xsane 3 years ago. I don't miss it.

[AlbertP]

We are in the Linux world right now. It's not allowed to say that Microsoft is doing something well .

[V!NCENT]

And if you're thinking "What the hell is this for a solution?", then considder that Microsoft has been doing that for ages with everything, even the upper layers of the NT kernel.

[V!NCENT]

OK. Over time X.org developped a lot of stuff that completely bypasses X11. The next step in the X.org roadmap is bypass itself entirely (almost) and become a state tracker.

Because all this new functionality can function without X11 itself, but horribly because that's not how X.org was build from the ground up, Wayland axes all that cruft and replaces it with itself.

Now a lot of people don't even know what Wayland is. Wayland is what X.org will eventualy become: a state tracker with built in windows management.

Now because Wayland sits on top of the new X.org-ish tech, it's modular. That means that Wayland talks to, and relies on, other software that it needs to talk to. That talk can instead be routed over the network. Simple.