Ubuntu Allegedly To Have Its Own X, Wayland Alternative

[uid313]

I got this thread when looking for Xorg & Wayland alternatives (first page of Google). I'm guessing this turned out to be a dead end?

In the early times there was the XFree86 project which implemented the X11 window protocol. It was used on many Unixes, it was used on Linux, BSD, and such, I think AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, etc. Due to licensing changing, XFree86 got forked and replaced by the X.Org Window System, main part being called the X.org Server which also implements the X11 window protocol.
It was and is extensively used, and X11 have been around for decades.
The X11 protocol was designed in old times when different things were expected from computers, as such it manages much more than just displaying pixels, it also deals with fonts, drawing shapes, and much more.
There also existed some used proprietary implementations of the X11 protocol, some claiming better performance by forgoing the client/server architecture.

Over 20 years ago, Sun also tried their own stuff with SunView and NeWS. NeWS was on PostScript. I think maybe Apple might have gone with the PostScript approach too.

X is still popular today, and the most widely used even today. Wayland is gaining traction. Wayland uses a different approach and treats everything as frames. It is a much simpler design and touts security benefits.

Canonical was pushing for their own thing called Mir, but they eventually abandoned that approach and rewrite Mir as a Wayland compositor instead.

There have been some small scales at putting up alternatives against the X Window System such as the Y Window System, but nothing have gained much traction. Some embedded devices used DirectFB instead of X.Org Server.

Here is a very good article about alternatives to X and Wayland.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=87281

[make_adobe_on_Linux!]

I got this thread when looking for Xorg & Wayland alternatives (first page of Google). I'm guessing this turned out to be a dead end?

[silix]

<...> So just "taking out the old stuff" does not necessarily work. Certain parts of the stack WOULD have to be redesigned and rewritten to make sure the code is clean at the end.

exactly

it wouldnt work nor be enough, when looking at the at the "X12" proposal (or the "Why X is not our ideal window system" paper), you realize that certain aspects of X are "less than ideal" (when not straight out broken) at the core protocol level (like the 16 bit unsigned dimension / 16 bit signed coordinate model allowing for 32K x 32K pixmaps with 3/4 of their surface unaddressable - or the drag and drop and clipboard model..)
and that if you want a sane and modern infrastructure (especially, one accomodating GPU's as first class citizens) what remains after taking parts away also need to undergo significant rethinking ( at which point it becomes something which is not X any more...)

[Ericg]

Then so be it.
Just strip out everything that can be stripped out, and if all GTK and Qt applications still work, and almost nothing of X is left, then that is just good, right?

Then the codebase will be smaller, it will be easier to maintain, quicker to compile, easier to fix bugs, and everything will be great.

There's one big impediment to X11-Light that does shout back to my issue of design it out, spec it out, write it out. And Daniel hit on it during the talk, X has 3 API's for input...and they are all inter-dependent on eachother. It frightens me to think about other spots in the Xorg stack where we have a similar issue where API's are inter-dependent on eachother AND redundant of eachother. So just "taking out the old stuff" does not necessarily work. Certain parts of the stack WOULD have to be redesigned and rewritten to make sure the code is clean at the end.

[Ericg]

The worst was whatever Citrix ICA used. I think they rolled their own scheme. That thing was unusable.

Never used it, probably for the better lol

[johnc]

Compared to what? VNC? No, I'll take RDP over VNC any day.

The worst was whatever Citrix ICA used. I think they rolled their own scheme. That thing was unusable.

[Ericg]

That bad, eh? Shit.

Compared to what? VNC? No, I'll take RDP over VNC any day.

[KellyClowers]

We may finally get Windows RDP quality

That bad, eh? Shit.

[JS987]

Yes, and those applications should still work too.
But there are lots of other cruft that we don't need to support, such as glyphs and drawing operations.

Text rendering shouldn't be removed as it is accelerated by graphics card.
rxvt-unicode won't work without XDraw* functions.

[Ericg]

As I understand it Xorg had when it was as biggest almost a million lines code, if I remember phoronix article right wayland has around ten thousands line ( in the middle of 2012).
Xorg light need to be very light if it should get that small. How big is the refactoring work that is needed to do something like that?



By the way, its look like Arch linux has wayland in their regular package repositories now.

There about, Daniel's video on Xorg -> Wayland quoted 900k though he said at one time he could've sworn that he saw 1.2Million. A lot of that was because in order to be platform-agnostic X had to do a lot of things that are now handled by other programs. For example, once upon a time Xorg had an entire printer server & stack built in because at the time none of the unix's had a standarized way to do printing, now we have CUPS and Samba but at the time it was needed. (Yes that got removed awhile back, Daniel said it was the largest, single, code purge in X's history lol)