The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
'X is Network Transparent.' Wrong. [It's] not. Core X and DRI-1 were network transparent. No one uses either one. Shared-Memory, DRI-2 and DRI-3000 are NOT network transparent, they do NOT work over the network. Modern day X comes down to synchronous, poorly done VNC. If it was poorly done, async, VNC then maybe we could make it work. But [it's] not. Xlib is synchronous (and the movement to XCB is a slow one) which makes networking a NIGHTMARE."
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The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 8, 2013 22:44 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Eric's argument for why not to call it X12 is bizarre -- because if it were called X12 people who care about X might care about it, as if they won't care if it's called something else! A better reason for its not being called X12 is that it is clearly not an evolution of X11 in the way X11 was an evolution of X10: it's not a network protocol at all...
"Multi-monitors is a client problem". That's code for "a random half of your applications will eventually support your second monitor: the other half won't", and is just as broken as client window decorations for exactly the same reason. How this is better than X, where nothing but SDL (sigh, fixed in SDL 2) needed hacking for multiple monitors on my system, is not at all clear. (I have a good few (non-free) games that insist on rendering on only one monitor, which is reasonable, but every one of them without exception can be forced to render on a specific one and turn the other one off.)
Nobody uses core X, he says. My Emacs disagrees, it's running on a headless server using network transparency, plus client-side fonts, right now and working quite happily with very low volumes of network traffic and effectively instantaneous screen updates.
"A higher-performance version of VNC", the protocol in which scrolling a nearly-completely-black screen with a bit of text on it over a 1Gbps network takes half a second or so and is juddery as hell. Wonderful. (From other comments on LWN, I understand that VNC is not quite so bad anymore, and that this should be fixed 'properly' by having every single toolkit independently reimplement network transparency, only not a single toolkit has actually done that to my knowledge. Doubtless they will all use totally different authentication mechanisms and have their own network-related security holes. If they reimplement it at all, which I doubt.)
"Every frame is perfect". I don't understand why this is such an issue. Total amount of flashing or tearing I have had in X since I got a graphics card newer than an S3: none, not even when doing simultaneous overlapping textured video playback and oolite. I don't know what the hell the Wayland people are doing with X to make it tear all the time, maybe it's compositing. If compositing is making X creak at the seams this much, maybe a rethink is necessary, but personally given the choice between network transparency and wobbly windows I'd jump at network transparency every time.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 8, 2013 22:51 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
You've just proven the point. Emacs uses client-side drawing and client-side fonts, like everything else these days. The only relevant applications left using core X drawing/font/etc primitives, or anything other than windows and pixmaps, are the X test suites.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 8, 2013 23:43 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
You've just proven the point. Emacs uses client-side drawing and client-side fonts, like everything else these days. The only relevant applications left using core X drawing/font/etc primitives, or anything other than windows and pixmaps, are the X test suites.Really? Xaw is a client-side drawing library, is it? 'cos my Emacs is using Xaw. It's using it because of a ten-year-old unfixed bug in Gtk whereby disconnecting from the X server, then shutting it down, then reconnecting to the new one, segfaults. Oops! This is... problematic for emacs --daemon usage, so anyone using that (anyone shutting their desktop down overnight and leaving their Emacs running on another machine) is still stuck using Xaw.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 1:02 UTC (Sun) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Do you have a link for the GTK+ bug report about the segfault when connecting to a new X server?
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 5:46 UTC (Sun) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:05 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 5:05 UTC (Mon) by Russ.Dill@gmail.com (guest, #52805) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 8:19 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:04 UTC (Mon) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]
Everyone worth it's bits knows that The Right Way(TM) to do it is run X over Emacs.No, the right way is to use a shell connection (not X) into the machine in question and have it transparently shuffle the files into your local copy of Emacs. For example, if you do
C-x C-f /ssh:frodo@barad-dur.mordor.xxx:/mnt/doom RET
then you'll get secure access to /mnt/doom as user frodo on host barad-dur.mordor.xxx without ever having to leave your local copy of Emacs.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:47 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 23:58 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]
Take care,
-stu
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 3:06 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
Distributed file access is important, but it's not the only thing.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 5:49 UTC (Tue) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]
So it'd be worth to give that a try. That said, there are doubtlessly advantages to the remote X setup, which I do appreciate in other occassions.
For your case (keeping the session alive), Emacs server might be an option too.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:09 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 20, 2013 18:28 UTC (Thu) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 25, 2013 20:57 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:04 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I'm running it remotely because the remote system (actually 'on the other side of my desk' on the other end of an unshared GbE connection, so not that remote) is faster than the local one, has ECCRAM where the local desktop (like most desktops) has normal RAM, has far *more* RAM which Emacs always likes, has the house RAID array local rather than over NFS, and is the machine that I don't shut down every night. Hence emacs --daemon is a lifesaver.
I cannot imagine that this is a particularly rare use case in these days of expensive power in Europe, given that desktops are often more power-hungry than headless servers. (Though it is true that perhaps not all that many people have a headless server at home, it's certainly not rare among developers, and among those developers a hell of a lot of them likely use remote X or would use something like it if it were available on their OS: remote headless servers are a lot less useful if you can't treat them 'mostly like your desktop' for worky stuff. But perhaps the Linux desktop is no longer targetted at developers?!)
As an aside, I do wish TuxOnIce hadn't gone moribund. I used to be able to suspend my desktop rather than shutting it down...
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 8, 2013 23:13 UTC (Sat) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]
"Multi-monitors is a client problem". That's code for "a random half of your applications will eventually support your second monitor: the other half won't", and is just as broken as client window decorations for exactly the same reason.Read "client" as "toolkit". Applications don't roll their own GUI from scratch anymore, so only a few toolkits need to (and probably will) implement the required "client" functionality for the vast majority of applications to benefit.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 8, 2013 23:45 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 5:03 UTC (Sun) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 8:21 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 17:45 UTC (Mon) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 7:48 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
And BTW take it to kronos, what ever gets to be a kronos standard is the one that will win.
I like the idea for compatibility
http://hack.org/mc/texts/gosling-wsd.pdf
Something very simple, even perhaps CoreX11 is too much (don't know), the remote case i would keep the protocol and download a conformant piece to every machine... its client, everybody downloads VNC etc if they wanted.
Most important of all take it kronos... let me see, about **ALL** the industry is there (fame and jobs).
The reality is that you are getting obsolete gentleman, the arguing is intense, but you seem to have lost the boat. Input(X) is bad ? ... what about streaminput ? ( i know NIH)... composition ? there is already a OpenWF http://www.khronos.org/openwf/ ( yes i know NIH) GL ? ... well they are at OpenGL4.3, the all edifice is being build around EGL i think (Linux DS is based on whatever fix for a problem seems the best by a few heads in a particular time, irrespective of others)
X, Wayland, MIR ??? ... i think this isn't going anywhere.
Perhaps Android DS can became full industry compliant (Kronos), and we can scrap all that s**t, no matter if many think that in point A or B their lady is much better.
If everybody coding for X (apps) could continue that would be awesome, but that is the only reason i see to give them the trouble to adopt another window system and protocol... **standard and lasting**... techs particularities are terceary importance, after all software can change all the time(to where is what might not be the wise thing, even if some tech argument is valid)
(it has do to with philosophy, complex systems above the "animal" don't evolve by competition, natural evolution crap, they destroy each other instead, like animals that eat each other... the natural paradigma of the human relation is cooperation not animal fagomania)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 14:51 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 16:25 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Multi-display will work without any changes in applications right now. After all, applications won't care about who's going to be displaying their buffers with pixels and the compositor can send them to whatever displays it wants.
But if you are going to do something more complicated, like switchable graphics, then you're going to have to support it within the applications. It'd be nice to have it on the Mesa (OpenGL) level, though.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 7:16 UTC (Sun) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]
Flashing and tearing is an issue. The ability to give presentations with no flickering on opengl effects (and particularly fading) is important. And unless compositing is disabled, flickering and flashing are there on X, even with intel or nvidia graphics.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:13 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:12 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 3:53 UTC (Mon) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Sure, and so does xeyes.
xeyes
Posted Jun 10, 2013 8:59 UTC (Mon) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]
xeyes
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:27 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
It would be less depressing if I hadn't been banging on about the same subject in virtually every thread on the same subject here for *years* and if Daniel hadn't been reading those threads as well and hadn't completely ignored them or been just as patronizing in all of those.
I wouldn't make such a fuss, except, again, this workflow is the one in which I have earned every penny I have ever earned. And it's not at all a subtle or unlikely workflow, unlike the workflow of someone making their living from a remote instance of fucking xeyes.
(Why yes, Daniel *has* just made me very angry. Way to piss off your users and make your users suspect that the Wayland developers don't give a damn about how their actual *users* are using the system they're trying to replace, mate. Well done. Very well done. Do I have any confidence in Wayland at all? Not after *that* comment.)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:23 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Sheesh. Talk about patronizing.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:07 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 25, 2013 20:34 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 25, 2013 20:52 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 12:25 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
It probably was a bit tongue in cheek.
As he pointed out in the article X12 has had a sort of 'draft' status for a long time now and has gone no-where. Long before Wayland came along.
If anything the Wayland remoting will be superior because it acknowledges how modern applications actually want to work rather then pretending that server side rendering primitives have any relevance any more.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 13:17 UTC (Mon) by kskatrh (guest, #73410) [Link]
X, X11, X Window System were terrible names IMO, and if anyone was seriously developing a follow-on to X11 called X12 I'd say they were severely misguided.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 15:31 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_%28industry_standard%29
This is normal.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 20:14 UTC (Mon) by Corkscrew (guest, #65853) [Link]
I'm not sure it was tongue in cheek. The impression I get is that the X community has a very entrenched focus on a particular group of power users. (For example all the commenters on here for whom network transparency is more important than tearing.) That makes it hard to effect major changes - you'll always be treading on someone's toes.
The only way to avoid being shouted down by this group is to essentially create a local fork of the *community* and pull resources (e.g. developers) across in a controlled fashion. In the absence of a meatspace version of Git, the easiest way to do this is to start an entirely new project, as this creates a barrier to entry for naysayers. Hence Wayland (and Mir for that matter).
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 21:17 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]
If Wayland becomes popular at some point down the road you might need to switch to use some application BUT I'd be willing to bet that at that point whatever issue you have with Wayland will be mostly addressed (though you will never address the underlying assumption that client side drawing is better) or at least band-aided over to be tolerable.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:31 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
And *that* is a loss of functionality. As mmarq has pointed out, Wayland only doesn't reduce functionality if *nobody targets it*. In which case its existence seems rather pointless.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 22:38 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
... as opposed to the majority of "normal" users of the hugely popular Linux Desktop?
I doubt the power users have more than one girlfriend in average.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 12, 2013 13:50 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]
... as opposed to the majority of "normal" users of the hugely popular Linux Desktop?
As opposed to the majority of "normal" users who don't use Linux Desktop (and increasingly don't use desktop at all). For these Wayland makes perfect sense... if you forget one tiny yet game-changing detail. Release date. Wayland released in 2003-2005 and then used in the "smartphones revolution" of 2007-2012 will be huge game changer. But it was not released neither in 2005 nor in 2007. Instead it was conceived in 2008 and released in the end of 2012.
Why "normal" users should use Wayland now when they have already made a different choice is enigma to me. I guess the hope at this point it to port Android (or may be BBX?) on top of Wayland - but I'm not seeing any movements in this direction.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 7:59 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
Whatever follows what is being cocked wit OpenMAX infrastructure has a chance, else niche.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 0:17 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Whereas doubtless Wayland's designers have already shipped a complete working system and expect to have most of us seamlessly switched over to Wayland within say 12-18 months. No?
If these are the best arguments for Wayland, Wayland is in deep trouble.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 1:14 UTC (Sun) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 7:09 UTC (Sun) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 14:55 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
It's a good move for them to write the article. Phoronix and related readers on Reddit are a source of much fud and bafflement related to X11/Wayland.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 3:51 UTC (Mon) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:42 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 12, 2013 11:27 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]
The difficulty with XCB (as compared with XLib) is that it exposes the request/response nature of X11 directly to the application.
For example, in XLib, if I want to find my parent window, I call XQueryTree(), which blocks me until the X server replies with all requested information.
To do the same with XCB, I need to use two of the window manipulation functions; I first call xcb_query_tree(), which returns a magic cookie. I then have to call xcb_query_tree_reply() to get at the result of my query tree operation.
This does give XCB two potential performance advantages when running over the network; the first is that I can often change my logic to send lots of requests, flush, then wait for the replies, which permits me to send larger network packets (as it sends all the requests in a minimum number of packets, rather than sending one packet for each request because XLib has blocked). The second is that I can hide latency; if I know that I'll need a reply in order to start processing the next iteration of a loop, I can send the request, do my processing for this iteration, then wait for the reply. For example, if I'm walking up the window tree and doing something at each level, I can code my loop as (pseudo-code):
analyse_parent_windows( connection, window, callback )
{
parent_cookie = xcb_query_tree( connection, window );
while( window != root_window )
{
reply = xcb_query_tree_reply( connection, parent_cookie, error );
handle error;
parent_cookie = xcb_query_tree( connection, reply.parent );
callback( connection, reply.parent );
}
}
This submits the request for the next parent while I'm still processing this window, and hopefully reduces the time I spend stalled waiting for X to reply. The equivalent done with XLib would have to wait after each query_tree operation for the X server to reply, resulting in lost time.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 12, 2013 21:02 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 16:21 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]
Pretty much that, plus some pain where XLib did multiple X roundtrips in one call (e.g. XQueryTree), and you now have to manage multiple request/reply pairs. There's also a small and shrinking area of pain where an extension is XLib-only, and you have to use XCB/XLib interop.
Additionally, the problems XCB fixes aren't visible if you do what most people do and use a local X server - they're only a pain if you want to use X over the network. So, for most developers, why port to XCB when you get easier, cleaner code with XLib?
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 16:52 UTC (Fri) by dark (guest, #8483) [Link]
We might need a library that makes using XCB easier :) And I don't mean one that tries to be a layer on top (that would be libX11 all over again), but a library that provides tools for managing multiple related xcb calls, helpers for useful patterns like prefetching, and tons of convenience functions for common operations.Unfortunately I probably wouldn't work on such a library because I'm not involved with any X11 based code anymore.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 15, 2013 1:32 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]
it's called Qt. :-D
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 12, 2013 10:31 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]
Whereas doubtless Wayland's designers have already shipped a complete working system and expect to have most of us seamlessly switched over to Wayland within say 12-18 months. No?
Suggest reading development mailing lists. For Fedora: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-March/180546.html.
So Fedora 19 has Wayland as alpha, 20 has it as beta, 21 as release.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 8:31 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
What I know is: at work we are supposed to use VNC but many of us use Xming instead (or Cygwin X).
The VNC / Remote Desktop / "desktop over desktop" user interface is completely broken. Two window managers on my screens? No thank you.
I've used remote X for as long as I've been using Unix. I do know how this works but it does work. I'm happy to believe that X11 is an unmaintainable engineer's nightmare fixed by Wayland. But if Wayland can't do remote X in some way then it's completely useless to every work place I've been to, big and small. And no I don't care a bit about fancy 3D graphics.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 9:36 UTC (Sun) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]
How do you come to the issue that must have multiple window managers? You you just assume it, and then you even state you don't know, and complain anyway. Not cool ;) Think of VNC as the abstract method of sending images vs. a protocol of drawing commands (Core X). Why does either method limit you of creating anything you need? Free your mind :-)
PS: You are probable using a crappy implementation of VNC (as in method) in remote X either way. As the drawing primitives by toolkits today consists of mostly sending images.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:15 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 12:27 UTC (Sun) by cmrx64 (guest, #89304) [Link]
As Eric says, nothing in Wayland precludes remoting equal to or better than X (it'd be better, because of the protocol's semantics). But nobody has implemented it yet, because they're working on other things.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 14:25 UTC (Sun) by mebrown (subscriber, #7960) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 16:20 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
You are assuming that merely stating a (non-negotiable) requirement is a critic.
> they are working towards a solution for VNC/remoting, that the solutions are more technically elegant, and that there are already prototypes?
Here it comes again: the good, old and infamous "more technically elegant prototype". Thanks for answering your question yourself.
I have an old & ugly product that just works. Why the hell would I switch to an elegant prototype? I'm not an X11 engineer, I'm just an X11 LUSER. God preserves my favourite distro from switching.
I feel really sorry for the Wayland developers that X11 raised the user expectations that high.
I mean, come on: we are talking about an important feature here and not asking for some obscure and crazy backward compatibility hack
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
I like LWN. I pay for it. I love the technically accurate and insightful articles *and comments*. The only thing that I find sometimes annoying is the inability of a large number of people in this crowd here to think outside the engineer box and put themselves in the shoes of a plain luser who wants important features not to break and to Just Keep Working.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 16:39 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
In many cases Wayland developers _are_ X11 developers.
>I mean, come on: we are talking about an important feature here and not asking for some obscure and crazy backward compatibility hack
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
You're wrong on so many levels...
First, the old style X11 is not going away. It's going to be supported on Wayland for any foreseeable future, so you can "ssh -X" to your heart's delight in the next 10-something years.
Second, Wayland is not just something out of the blue. It's a logical evolution of real-world X11 usage patterns. It solves very real problems with X11.
Third, trying to preserve X11 will continue to make it more and more complicated and hard to support. Which will (at some point) make it impossible to add new features.
> put themselves in the shoes of a plain luser who wants important features not to break and to Just Keep Working.
They have. So X11 won't be broken. Your apps won't go away. Keep calm and continue working.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 21:05 UTC (Sun) by dig (guest, #91108) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 21:08 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 8:28 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
IF a dev codes for X, and he continues, wouldn't be much better to run it directly on X instead of a server on top of another ?
And yes i read all the arguments, but i see 2 trends developing for applications. One is Kronos the other is HSA, and they are some how very close related in many points.
Even Nvidia will eventually join(both) with their ARM push, and the same with Apple(LLVM is the dev base of HSA and Apple is LLVM). More dubious is Intel and Microsoft. The strength of X is not what lays ahead but the enormous baggage that lays behind... Why change ?... in a pure app POV what isn't broke don't fix it, the DS is *orthogonal*... so again why change ?
Is any of those DS , X, Wayland or Mir, going in the direction of the industry ?
(if i was an app dev right now, i would want it on Mac, Linux, Android and Windows etc... if possible... all this discussions and promises don't give me any incentive)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 17:18 UTC (Tue) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]
Devs code for toolkits: SDL, Gtk, Qt, or even more high-level. One of the toolkits' jobs is to provide portability (though apps will use platform calls when the toolkits are weak on that front). I don't think a brand-new Kronos standard will displace them.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 22:04 UTC (Sun) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
I know. And the only thing harder than doing X is continuing to shoehorn new features into it as it goes along.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:08 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
You don't know much about X then.
X11 runs perfectly well on many operating systems besides Linux. Windows and OS X are both examples that are supported by Xorg's Xservers. In fact one of the biggest contributors to Xorg is Apple and they use that code directly in their X11 related Apple products.
I find it extremely unlikely that Wayland will be much harder to support then Windows or OS X is.
In fact how Wayland is designed it should simplify the functionality of Xservers for Linux massively.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:33 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:26 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:46 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
There isn't many people clamoring for X11 support in any OS except Linux (or the BSDs), but it does exist.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 22:49 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
Because these servers are useful to run applications remotely of course.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 17:32 UTC (Sun) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]
:-))) ! Thanks,
*t
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 9, 2013 21:16 UTC (Sun) by Mook (subscriber, #71173) [Link]
Pretty much it keeps being described as a solution for VNC. From a user's point of view, VNC (/RFB) is horrible in that it is presented as a giant rectangular hole in which things show up, completely disconnected from the environment around it. In contrast, X can be forwarded without a root window so that things integrate well. If people start consistently describing the future Wayland solution without comparing it to VNC (even if it does do pixel scraping instead of sending drawing commands over), people like me will stop hating on it. As far as I can tell, this is the direction it's actually going anyway; it's just been a horrible communication problem because it's actually more VNC-like in a way that isn't quite as important to the user.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 1:21 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]
Yeah, I cringe whenever I see the parallel to VNC brought up, because, as you point out, it makes all the wrong associations.
The VNC user experience sucks. And by that, I mean the end-to-end user experience of someone who fires up a VNC client and VNC server overtop of the existing windowing environments. The one where you get a window that behaves as a (crappy) monitor and doesn't integrate well at all with a desktop environment. (For example, getting tons of spurious "Cannot empty clipboard" errors in Excel on my Windows box whenever I leave something in the selection buffer on my remote VNC'd X connection.) Wayland, so far as I've read and understood it, does not seek to replicate that in any way.
Using communication model with async, timestamped requests and a focus on shipping bitmaps for windows instead of drawing primitives seems like a reasonable model these days for shipping a window from one machine to another. This model bears some resemblance to how VNC forwards an entire screen from one end to another, and keyboard/mouse inputs back the other way, but as I understand it, Wayland will just do this for individual windows.
Sounds entirely reasonable to me, and perhaps provide the best of both. Also sounds like it's less likely to hit snags, such as my fonts disagreeing between two machines leading to software looking weird.
I'm personally avoiding getting too excited (positive or negative) about Wayland until it gets to a point where it's worth it for me to give it a spin around the block, and that means finding it in a distro somewhere. I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm a little skeptical about some things, but I'm reserving judgment until later.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 9:16 UTC (Mon) by blackwood (guest, #44174) [Link]
What's holding things up is simply that other stuff is currently a higher priority (like plugging the holes in the input layer for input methods and fleshing out the window display mode a bit). But I guess it'll all be in place when desktops environments have working Wayland code, together with XWayland and all the other pieces we need to have for a well-working full-fledged Wayland desktop.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:20 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The end result is pretty impressive.Except if you want to scroll windows full of text, since that means repainting the entire screen rather than erasing a line from the top, shuffling the rest up, and painting a line at the bottom (or vice versa), since it has no understanding of the semantics of scrolling.
I am told that in order to get such a rare and obscure use case to work I have to wait for toolkit-level remoting, which is as far as I can tell a complete mirage: nobody is working on it, nobody is planning to work on it, if people do work on it their work for distinct toolkits will be totally uncoordinated (natch), why aren't you happy with VNC-style bitmap shuffling nobody needs to scroll windows full of text anyway.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:14 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Again, this is completely false.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 13:21 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
There is absolutely no reason why you can't have individual applications remoted. If people want Wayland to be configured to be able to send individual display buffers over the network rather then a composited desktop then that should be very possible.
> I've used remote X for as long as I've been using Unix. I do know how this works but it does work.
It works sorta.
For your specific use case, really.
At my work we use a wide variety of remote desktop and remote application using Citrix and Windows and the idea that Linux/X11 is competitive with what you can accomplish using something like Microsoft Windows is ludicrous.
> I'm happy to believe that X11 is an unmaintainable engineer's nightmare fixed by Wayland. But if Wayland can't do remote X in some way then it's completely useless to every work place I've been to, big and small. And no I don't care a bit about fancy 3D graphics.
X11 can't even do what you _BELIEVE_ X11 can do. For most applications you really end up just shoving huge textures over the network similar to what people do with VNC, only much worse.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 14:35 UTC (Mon) by dps (guest, #5725) [Link]
NX takes doing work on the *server* side much further: it does extensive server side caching and has amazing performance other links with high latency and low bandwidth.
X has its faults but storing things on the server so things like cut paste between clients running on different boxes work is not one of them. Nor is allowing clients to actually use the acceleration available on the server.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 14:51 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:22 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:12 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Then the more significant hurdle is updating GLX beyond GL 1.5, which as others have noted, is a hell of a lot of work.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 10, 2013 14:58 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
When the ability to get accelerated indirect rendering working on X I experimented with playing games over X11 protocol remotely.
It worked very well graphic-wise. But the controls were very laggy. So while the graphics rendered fast enough, the controls make it relatively unusable except under very ideal situations (ie: from one side of a lan to another)
Device and Network Independence
Posted Jun 10, 2013 10:48 UTC (Mon) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]
Of course, for the sake of gamers, we may select GL/ES as the language instead of good old Postscript (but I'm still hesitating with the DVI command set for LNCS books reading). Let's have that Wayland *be* the toolkit server, the software that will unify Qt, GTK, DirectX and the like under a single rule (network independently of course.)
Device and Network Independence
Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:17 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
Instead of dictating methods on how Applications should be rendered (which X11 tries to do, and fails) all it cares about is the buffers produced by the application themselves. If the application wants to use OpenGL, DirectX, QT, GTK, or space monkeys with typewriters to render itself it makes little difference as far as Wayland is concerned, ideally.
Device and Network Independence
Posted Jun 11, 2013 8:39 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
Consistent look & feel is important, and it could even use space monkeys. freedom is ok but anarchie is not
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 5:07 UTC (Tue) by russell (guest, #10458) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 13:02 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 12, 2013 10:20 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]
GNOME shell will takeover some parts what Weston is doing AFAIK (+it was a logical thing to do). Making GNOME 3 fully work (on screen keyboard, accessibility, etc) will provide enough guidance on which things are lacking. Seems better to focus on the needs of current DEs (KDE, GNOME) rather than making another.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 10:39 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 14:01 UTC (Tue) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
If toolkits can select X or Wayland at runtime depending on the environment, why wouldn't we want them to do just that? That appears to be (more or less) what the Qt Wayland folks are trying to do:
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/qt5.html
A similar effort is underway for GTK.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 11, 2013 15:45 UTC (Tue) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 12, 2013 1:08 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
Out of curiosity, what deficiencies of GTK/GDK would motivate a developer to do such a thing?
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 12, 2013 1:49 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
Suppose I wanted to write a soft keyboard. Drawing the keyboard responding to events could all be handled by GTK/GDK. But to actually send the keystroke events to the window with the focus, direct xlib/xcb calls would be needed.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 12, 2013 10:15 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]
It's far too early to encourage toolkits and WMs to target Wayland directly for anything that can already be supported on top of X
Around 60% of the core GNOME modules already work under Wayland. The plan is a beta in GNOME 3.10, full support in GNOME 3.12. If a GTK 3.x+ application doesn't make specific X calls, it'll work under Wayland (devil is in the details :P). Firefox also finally seems to be going to GTK 3.x, though as they're huge, they might have various dependencies still assuming X.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 13, 2013 15:01 UTC (Thu) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]
Is there a list of those modules? I didn't see Wayland in Gnome's CI thing.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 13, 2013 16:06 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]
Suggest reading the wiki, because there are various things that really need to be implemented. Desktop environment is a bit more than just components.
conceptual disagreement between people working on Wayland
Posted Jun 13, 2013 13:39 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Cheers,
Wol
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:35 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
With that sort of attitude, I have no confidence that remote Wayland will *ever* work properly. Clearly Daniel just has a laptop and does all his work on it, and damn everyone who uses more than one machine for anything.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 11, 2013 15:45 UTC (Tue) by david.a.wheeler (guest, #72896) [Link]
Daniel Stone emphasizes the problems of X, and is working to fix them with a new infrastructure. Sounds great! In particular, his outline of the PROBLEMS and why they happened are quite sensible. I look forward to trying out Wayland.
But I think Daniel Stone's effort to explain Wayland shows why users are so confused and concerned about Wayland. I think Daniel Stone's material is not clear to people who are not already steeped in Wayland. The problem isn't so much with Wayland. I think most explanations about Wayland - including this one - are confusing potential users, particularly regarding network transparency.
Daniel Stone says that "X is not network transparent". The problem is that this statement is obviously false. I routinely use X over a network with firefox, terminal, etc. So do lots of other people. We've done it for decades, and we plan to keep using network transparency. Statements like this make it appear that the Wayland developers don't understand X at all. Daniel Stone does understand X. I think what he means is that X is grossly inefficient over a network, in part because some extensions (shared memory, DRI-2, DRI-3000) are not network transparent, and in part because of all the synchronous requests that drive up latency. But statements that may be correct in a technical sense, but are clearly false to Joe User, are not helping the Wayland case. If he had simply said "X is very inefficient at network transparency, creating long unpredictable latency and complex programming" then it'd be easier to follow the point.
Regarding, "Wayland should be BETTER than X at remoting" - that may be true. But I didn't see in this text, or any other text, a commitment to actually implement remoting in Wayland. I think most users want to hear a commitment that Wayland will support network transparency in some manner - and all we hear is a statement of possibility.
So... whoever provides more facts about Wayland, please acknowledge that users (from the user's point of view) do get network transparency in X, explain why Wayland will do it better, and state a commitment that Wayland will implement remoting. The current text does not make that clear.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 11, 2013 17:05 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 13, 2013 11:20 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]
1. When I execute an application capable of displaying a GUI it appears on my local screen no matter what machine I am logged in to.
2. When I write a GUI application in the most naive possibly way it will work as described in (1) without me thinking about it during development.
If I write a GTK application today I don't have to put in a single line to get support for remoting (I don't have to plan for it) and if I run it on a remote system it displays locally without me, the user, having to configure anything. That's transparency. It's perfectly okay if the toolkit handles the hard work for me as long as it's easy enough that all toolkits are likely to include support.
Based on this definition:
Does Wayland support network transparency?
Is there a commitment by current Wayland developers to supporting network transparency?
But X can't do that ...
Posted Jun 13, 2013 13:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]
Okay, I run KDE not Gnome, but the blame has been laid firmly at the feet of dbus - a Gnome innovation ...
The only way I have managed to get remote apps to work is to do a remote login and forward the entire session - any attempt to do a "DISPLAY=... command" just keels over.
And even that doesn't work over Cygwin - the login used to regularly fail half way through, and now if the screensaver cuts in I can never recover the desktop - I just have to close X and start again...
Cheers,
Wol
Works for me
Posted Jun 13, 2013 15:33 UTC (Thu) by david.a.wheeler (guest, #72896) [Link]
I routinely use X to access remote systems. So, it "works for me". Sorry it's not working for you.
Works for me
Posted Jun 26, 2013 6:21 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Indeed, for me X works better than VNC, over a wifi connection that has OK latency but unreliable bandwidth. VNC is annoying to use over this, X is fine - you wouldn't know the window was a remote one using it!
But X can't do that ...
Posted Jun 13, 2013 17:42 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]
The fact that Desktop Environment authors seem to feel that every application, no matter how trivial should use DBUS is yet one more example of problems in that space.
But X can't do that ...
Posted Jun 14, 2013 14:22 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:41 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
As you point out modern toolkits tend to just produce fully rendered pixmaps and not use the Core X11 drawing primitives, so applications are reduced to just shuffling pixmaps around, inefficiently, for remote use.If they're using the render extension properly (which they are) this is an entirely inaccurate description of how textual regions are handled. The bitmaps comprising the textual glyphs are *not* sent repeatedly over and over again in repeated bitmap shuffles, but just once.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 11, 2013 23:06 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
For lusers like me this is probably better reading than Phoronix' article then:
http://www.nomachine.com/documents/getting-started.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Com...
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 14, 2013 14:00 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]
I wonder whether I am splitting hairs here, but is using X11 over ssh, which is what I presume most people here are talking about, technically the same thing as using X11 network transparency? ssh simulates a local X server and transparently proxies everything to an X server on a different machine, where it pretends that they are local clients. So from the point of view of server and client, everything looks like it is local, except that X11 features which cannot be proxied are not available.
Of course I don't know how easy it would be to do the same thing with Wayland. Presumably the Wayland protocol itself would not be a problem, but the proxy server would need at the least to track and proxy graphics buffer updates on the machine actually running the application, or alternatively intercept and proxy operations on them. The last might be tricky given that there are no restrictions on what interfaces can be used to access the buffers, but actually for most situations the first should be good enough. (I keep hearing noises about Kristian Høgsberg being working on something like this, but I haven't heard any about it being usable yet.)
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 14, 2013 15:29 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 14, 2013 18:07 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]
not quite
SSh forwarding does not simulate a local X server. It simulates a network X server running on localhost.
This is significantly different.
A local X server can use all sorts of shortcuts like shared memory for communication, while a network X server, even one talking to localhost, requires all the same infrastructure that you have to do true network transparency.
the Wayland interface is explicitly NOT able to be sent over a network, it requires local-only interfaces.
The suggested approach of using VNC is the situation where you have some process that simulates the display side and then ships the results elsewhere.
This is exactly the point that concerns so many people who routinely use the existing network transparency.
I remember running Quake over X in the late 90's, the only problem I had was that I hadn't bothered to try remoting the audio, so the sound came from the server two cubes over from me.
Saying that X is unusable for anything is just incorrect.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 14, 2013 19:49 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]
I stand corrected. Makes sense.
>the Wayland interface is explicitly NOT able to be sent over a network, it requires local-only interfaces.
I haven't looked at the protocol that closely, but what local-only interfaces does it need other than the small matter of the graphics buffers?
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 14, 2013 21:36 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
As is pointed out before, modern toolkits often use different rendering methods depending on whether they have local X (with shared memory, DRI) or remote X (serialized, sensitive to round trips), as well as for other platforms (Win32, OSX Quartz). Wayland support is provided by both a standardized protocol and a shared library which toolkits can use which is the canonical implementation of the protocol. The same approach should be taken for remote rendering, providing a standard protocol (maybe based on VNC or SPICE or including both wire formats) and a standard library implementing the protocol which toolkits can use. Then we could have real discussion on the best methods to implement a remote display protocol and what primitives should be made available for toolkit authors.
For example your toolkit, which I remind you can output on multiple type of platforms, knows which regions are scrollable, which are bitmaps, which are clickable, etc. so you can have an optimized, toolkit independent, way of remoting each region. Maybe you can pass compressed bitmaps directly and have them uncompressed on the remote end or cache text glyphs or pre-render scrollable areas. At the very least you can have some primitives that any toolkit can use to find their own clever ways to optimize for remove display.
I guess we need a team as passionate about remote display as the Wayland/X team is about local display. If the work is good enough it might even turn into a cross platform industry standard.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 14, 2013 14:58 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
X provides network support, if you go out of your way to ensure that you have performance worse than VNC/RDP, using APIs different to those you'd use for local rendering. And by 'you', I mean 'the toolkit used by your application'. In that sense, I don't believe that Wayland is conceptually much different.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 14, 2013 18:10 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]
nobody disputes that there are cases where VNC/RDP do work better, but pretending in the face of specific examples that that is true for all cases hurts the credibility of Wayland.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 14, 2013 19:04 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
(And hey, if that's bothering you, why? XWayland continues to exist as a first-class solution. Just do remote forwarding to that.)
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:51 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
FWIW, with the exception of a bunch of molecular modellers almost the only people I have ever seen use X in anger outside Linux distributors, and the only people I have ever seen use remote X routinely, have used it overwhelmingly for... text editing! In fact this is a majority use case for *all* computers used in work environments, if you include word processors and spreadsheets, which will suffer the same scroll-related problems as text editors if run remotely over anything implemented via bitmap-hurling.
But you don't care about that, as you have made abundantly clear by comparing those of us who care about remote use of such applications to people using xeyes. I'm not sure what use cases you *do* care about, if text editors and word processors and spreadsheets are all excluded. It doesn't leave much except for video playback and web browsers, and if you only want to use *those* you might as well use a tablet these days.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 18, 2013 12:09 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/rolling-hash/f8.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/rolling-hash/f9.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/rolling-hash/f8-f9-deb...
And then come back and tell me again how no-one working on Wayland cares about terminals, text editors, or scrolling text.
How you've taken from me saying that the overwhelming majority of my day is spent in vim, irssi, Evolution, Evince, or Chrome scrolling huge chunks of text, that I don't care about scrolling text, is honestly beyond me. I'm not comparing scrolling text to xeyes either: I'm saying that even X11 isn't a very efficient protocol for scrolling text, because oddly enough the most efficient protocol for doing that is text-based. Like SSH. Just as X11 is the most efficient protocol for transferring X11 primitives.
I'm done arguing with people who have constructed strawman motives for a strawman protocol, neither of which bear any resemblance whatsoever to reality.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 18, 2013 13:09 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Why on earth didn't you just say that to start with rather than going all sarcastic and contemptuous? All I said was that I couldn't think of an implementation -- that doesn't mean there isn't one.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 18, 2013 13:57 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 25, 2013 20:31 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 18, 2013 13:11 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Kristian's rolling-hash implementationOof. So you're still analyzing bitmaps on every scroll to determine that they consist of scrolled text. Cache-ruinous compared to what is currently done. Oh well, at least you're not throwing them over the network.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 17, 2013 11:44 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
It's not fair to say VNC/RDP, as if they're similar, when RDP is really more like X than it is like VNC.
It will ship rendered bitmaps over the wire if necessary, but it should only be necessary in the case that the client has done its own rendering into a bitmap, where X would need to do the same.
The experience of using RDP is vastly better than VNC in pretty much all cases, and at least somewhat better than X in the grand majority of cases.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 18, 2013 20:52 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
The main exception to that strategy is that desktop compositing does get done on the client via dedicated compositor commands.
The experience of RDP *is* vastly better than VNC, but that's not because it's using primitive drawing commands -- that strategy stopped working out very well years ago.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 19, 2013 11:52 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
True, applications aren't requesting that the windowing system draw a line segment from A to B, and so on, but in practice X11 applications aren't doing that either.
There is a middle ground in between basic line-drawing primitives and bitmap scraping. RDP does typically work at a higher level than screen scraping, which is why nix's example of scrolling a text editor sounds highly suspect - I've just tried connecting to a Windows desktop (via whatever mechanism Remmina uses for rdp; I guess it wraps rdesktop), opening a large-ish file in gVim, and scrolling both casually line-by-line and madly by mashing page down. It's just as fast and responsive as running vim in an xterm over the same link[0] (ping ~45ms), and in fact seems to have slightly less input lag. Notably, looking at the data transferred, RDP is using a fair bit *less* bandwidth.
The point is that VNC is not comparable to this. It very clearly has to resend large amounts of data for even single line scrolls; it doesn't work in the same way at all.
With any luck Wayland's remoting will sit at a similar point to RDP on the primitives<->scraping spectrum, and everything will be rainbows and unicorns.
[0] That is, 'ssh -X <host> xterm vim'. For a more direct comparison, I did try 'ssh -X <host> gvim', but that really wasn't a fair comparison since X is useless over WAN links. The bandwidth requirement was higher still, and the input latency was so high that nobody could seriously consider it usable in any but the most desperate of circumstances. If you are only ever moving line-by-line, then it would win over VNC, but if you ever want to scroll a whole screenful it takes a similar amount of time.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 19, 2013 13:05 UTC (Wed) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]
> The point is that VNC is not comparable to this. It very clearly has to resend large amounts of data for even single line scrolls; it doesn't work in the same way at all.
Actually, the VNC *protocol* are fully capable of efficient scrolling, but most VNC server *implementations* work by doing screen scraping and don't have any heuristics to detect scrolling, thus resulting in terrible performance. The Wayland reference implementation is a lot better in this regard, and performs much better than what is typical for VNC, even though it uses the same design principles.
Also worth noting is that the Weston reference implementation actually uses the RDP protocol, which btw also uses the same design principles as VNC.
So if you compare a typical VNC implementation and the Windows RDP implementation, the Weston implementation should be closer to the later, as the server sits at the same position in the graphics stack *and* uses the same wire protocol (though implementation differences will of course make some impact).
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 19, 2013 13:56 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Now *that* is interesting information. Perhaps I'm reading too much into your choice of the word 'most', but does that mean you know of VNC servers which are better in this regard? And do they require a matching client?
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 19, 2013 14:47 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 19, 2013 15:28 UTC (Wed) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]
Most VNC servers make some use of the protocol feature (i.e. for window movement on the virtual desktop), but to my knowledge no X11-based VNC server is capable of automatically using the feature when scrolling part of a window.
That said, libVNCServer makes it available to custom applications, and x11vnc has an experimental command line option to try to detect scrolling in the frames it scrapes from the X11 server.
> And do they require a matching client?
The "CopyRect" image encoding is one of the five original encodings of the specification, but only the "Raw" image encoding (uncompressed bitmap data) is mandated, everything else is negotiated per session. So while most clients support it, some might not.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 25, 2013 20:32 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:39 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Regarding, "Wayland should be BETTER than X at remoting" - that may be true. But I didn't see in this text, or any other text, a commitment to actually implement remoting in Wayland. I think most users want to hear a commitment that Wayland will support network transparency in some manner - and all we hear is a statement of possibility.Yes. This.
(It's not as if my 'run on a remote box with graphical output in a local window, scroll text efficiently in that window, allow disconnection and complete powerdown of the local machine without breaking the remote client' use case should be incredibly difficult, either. Heck, X could do all of that in the mid-to-late 80s!)
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 19, 2013 7:14 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Other than Emacs, what apps actually support this? For me, every time the SSH connection does, anything that used X over it dies.
Wayland explanations are STILL confusing and worrying users
Posted Jun 25, 2013 20:38 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 13, 2013 0:19 UTC (Thu) by amarao (guest, #87073) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 13, 2013 16:40 UTC (Thu) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link]
I hate this baby-out-with-the-bathwater attitude which seems to be infecting the free software world; we're expected to hail the new wonder child as our saviour who promises to do all kinds of things better when in fact it _does not_ and might well never do.
Maybe Wayland will be everything that X is now and better... I'll believe it when I see the proof and will be sad if, as I suspect, that day never comes but X is reduced to unsupported abandonware and we have to live with something actually less useful.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 6:33 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
or "just" take over maintenance of X when it's abandoned.That should be easy, right ?
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 13:33 UTC (Fri) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link]
Note that I _hope_ this doesn't happen and that Wayland really does do everything X does but better... I just don't like the way it's been pushed so far, it brings to mind gnome 3 and Windows 8 / Metro amongst others...
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 14:09 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
Programs mostly use Qt/GTK/EFL and OpenGL or things like SDL. Those are the parts that decide if an application is compatible with a display infrastructure (X, Wayland,... well, even Mir).
Your program looses compatibility with X when the library you use does. Some are built so that the display backend can be choosen at runtime. From what I see, one backend will be deleted with a commit message like "this has been broken for two years and nobody even noticed".
I expect Xwayland to keep working for a very long time. I hope because I still hope to play the handful of linux native games I own.
Of course, compatibility is never an easy thing. You *can* expect things to break from time to time if nobody tests and reports less used backends.
> it brings to mind gnome 3 and Windows 8 / Metro
Different things.
Gnome3/Metro are (AFAIK, I never used Metro) user interface and user visible changes.
X->Wayland is a technical change. The user should be (ideally) presented exactly the same UI with Wayland that it was with X.
There will be minor (for the user) changes, like the way screensavers/screenlock and screenshot functionalities are exepcted to change, but apart that, the user should not see anything different (except early adopter, those who test, report etc.)
Yes, I'm aware of my heavy use of "should" :)
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:23 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
In the 26 years since X11's initial release, it's gained multi-output support (four times), multi-input-device support (three times), hotplugging for both, a new keyboard model, a compositing model, a new rendering model, direct OpenGL rendering support (twice), indirect OpenGL rendering, accelerated indirect OpenGL rendering, a new font rendering model including anti-aliasing (three-ish times), autoconfiguration support, an acceleration architecture (four-ish times), Display PostScript support (later removed), a print server (also later removed, thank god), and has been ported to everything from mobile phones to renderfarms.
So how you can essentially accuse us of not having trying, and done this frivolously, is beyond me.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 20, 2013 13:54 UTC (Thu) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link]
Nobody has claimed that X is perfect, but I do claim that it does absolutely everything I want it to do, does it without any fuss and has done so for a decade and a half (over which time the things I've been actually using it for have changed quite a bit.) Remote X display has never, ever been a "nightmare" for me, or for anyone I know - frankly I've always considered it verging on the miraculous! If X has problems, which I'm not disputing, they're at a level where _users_ don't see them. I wish the Wayland developers all the best, and if they can make it all work as well and transparently as X currently does I'll be very happy!
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 20, 2013 15:34 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> technology is wheeled out at the barely usable prototype stage, claimed to be the one true way with all that went before being completely broken and to be abandoned
Some of that is just a consequence of open development, by definition you have the software before it is in a "finished" state, and see the dark corners as it is being made. Often the software isn't really "done" or "ready" until after several iterations of release, sometimes spanning years, and everyone has to suffer through the iterations until it works the way it should. See GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, they really didn't get into their stride with feature completeness until after the .8 or .10 release.
> completely broken and to be abandoned... while the replacement doesn't actually DO everything that its predecessor did
Some times things are replaced without knowing why the old thing did the things it did, google "mjg59 lighdm" for a good example of that. Unfortunately there sometimes isn't enough manpower for parallel development and maintenance.
> Remote X display has never, ever been a "nightmare" for me, or for anyone I know - frankly I've always considered it verging on the miraculous! If X has problems, which I'm not disputing, they're at a level where _users_ don't see them
And that is due to the very hard work of people like Keith Packard and Daniel Stone and all the X.org team. They have busted their butts over the years trying to make X not suck so that you and I could be blissfully unaware of the contortions and brokenness behind the scenes. It's a testament to their success and hard work that people don't believe them when they say that X11 is fundamentally broken.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 13, 2013 19:25 UTC (Thu) by Fats (guest, #14882) [Link]
When I last delved into this it was up to the clients to move their own windows, minimize/maximize them, etc. So when the client is busy with something else you can't move it's windows. Let me tell you this is one the Windows 'features' I hated most. Is this fixed in the mean time for Wayland ?
Maybe this is needed for this having the 'display right all the time'. But if I have to choose between windows movable at all times or flicker/lag free display at all time, I'll choose movable at all times without a wink.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 6:36 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
If I remember correctly, it's a choice that's made at the compositor level. For example, I think that for Kwin (the compositor), window management will not be done by the client.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 8:56 UTC (Fri) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]
No, I made a similar mistake but this is wrong..
What happen is: when you click on the tittle-bar, the client recognize that you want to move its window and it asks the compositor to put the window in a "move mode": then when you move your mouse the compositor will move your window without the client being involved.
So 1) moving window will be smooth(done entirely server side) once the 'move mode' has started
2) if the client is busy then yes, you can't move its windows, but as the compositor ping continuously the clients, it can detect frozen window and "takeover" the window management.
Things are different for resizing where indeed you have the trade-off you describe, and as you said with Weston resizing is made by the client so every frame will be "perfect" BUT if the client is slow/busy then the resizing will be jerky/lagging (you move your pointer but the window doesn't resize until the client catch up).
IMHO this isn't very good here, like you, if a client is slow/busy I prefer that resizing its window has smooth resizing of the outline even if the content can become "ugly" (when the client fails to provide the content in time) to 'perfect frame' but with jerky/lagging.
Ideally we would use BeOS-like multithreaded clients which would never be slow/busy but in the meantime the trade-off is here..
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 14, 2013 14:25 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]
>No, I made a similar mistake but this is wrong..
>What happen is: when you click on the tittle-bar, the client recognize that you want to move its window and it asks the compositor to put the window in a "move mode": then when you move your mouse the compositor will move your window without the client being involved.
I seem to recall hearing something about the client informing the window manager in advance about which areas of the window could be used for dragging, so that it would work even if the client was not responsive. I might be wrong though.
>IMHO this isn't very good here, like you, if a client is slow/busy I prefer that resizing its window has smooth resizing of the outline even if the content can become "ugly" (when the client fails to provide the content in time) to 'perfect frame' but with jerky/lagging.
I have to say that I actually prefer resizing to be the client's business, having seen enough cases of the window manager and client mis-co-ordinating that. In extreme cases the window manager could still clip the client.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:56 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
as the compositor ping continuously the clientsIsn't that rather bad for power management?
One hopes that it actually pings clients which should have an event directed to them when such an event turns up, which would add no overhead and have the same effect of detecting slow or unresponsive clients reasonably rapidly.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 12:43 UTC (Tue) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 18, 2013 13:09 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 19, 2013 0:24 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
It does.
The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)
Posted Jun 25, 2013 20:37 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]