John Carmack Is Interested In Wayland On Ubuntu

[phoronix]

Phoronix: John Carmack Is Interested In Wayland On Ubuntu

John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software and lead developer of the Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake games, among others, is apparently interested in Wayland. Yes, actually the Wayland Display Server. He just used his Twitter account to share that he wishes he had the time to contribute to it and then linked to Mark Shuttleworth's blog post announcing Ubuntu will be switching to Wayland with their Unity desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODc2Nw

[aaaantoine]

I believe that John, having as much clout as he does in the gaming industry, has just done something marvelous for Wayland.

Sure, he didn't give any specifics other than he wishes he had time to contribute, but that shout-out alone will generate further interest for it.

[jbrown96]

Michael,

Please stop hyping stuff that is, at best, years away. You're jeopardizing your credibility by jumping on the Wayland bandwagon so vigorously. This is so similar to your stories (not articles) about Steam coming to Linux. You never even acknowledged Valve's announcement that Steam isn't being ported to the platform.

There's a disturbing tend that any time anyone even mentions Wayland, it gets a story. John Carmack said literally nothing about Wayland.

As anyone who follows opensource graphics driver development, it should be painfully obvious that development on things like this are very slow. Michael is acting like the messiah's triumphet return is nigh. What happens when there's constant, small improvements in Wayland? The hype can't sustain itself.

Wayland may turn out to be great; I'm suspicious, but it's certainly a possibility. However, there's no debate that it's years away from general use, so what's the use of reporting every time someone mentions it?


Games on Wayland are going to happen about as much/fast as games on X: not at all. Seriously, Linux is not a gaming platform.

[damipereira]

Michael,

Please stop hyping stuff that is, at best, years away. You're jeopardizing your credibility by jumping on the Wayland bandwagon so vigorously. This is so similar to your stories (not articles) about Steam coming to Linux. You never even acknowledged Valve's announcement that Steam isn't being ported to the platform.

There's a disturbing tend that any time anyone even mentions Wayland, it gets a story. John Carmack said literally nothing about Wayland.

As anyone who follows opensource graphics driver development, it should be painfully obvious that development on things like this are very slow. Michael is acting like the messiah's triumphet return is nigh. What happens when there's constant, small improvements in Wayland? The hype can't sustain itself.

Wayland may turn out to be great; I'm suspicious, but it's certainly a possibility. However, there's no debate that it's years away from general use, so what's the use of reporting every time someone mentions it?


Games on Wayland are going to happen about as much/fast as games on X: not at all. Seriously, Linux is not a gaming platform.

Hype is not bad I think, because this kind of new stuff needs to get known And it's also good to motivate people, if you say "I'ts years away but it may be good someday though I doubt" or something like that, you will make potential contributors go away, but if you say "It should solve a lot of problems, seems to be really good, everyone is talking about it, in 2 years it will be default",etc,etc then some people will believe it and maybe start testing it or just running the voice which will also atract new contributors.
So I think phoronix is doing the right thing saying this aloud, and also, it's the new stuff and it's exciting so it's interesting to read, I don't see any problem with publishing this.
PD:who talked about games? theres a lot of stuff not working right that may be fixed by wayland, like less bugs, less blinks, etc.

[Nobu]

Maybe short stories like these should be put on twitter/identi.ca. Then people who want news now can find it there. Later on you can create a story on this site which sums up all the little stories with links to further information.

Is that doable?

[Raven3x7]

I'm a bit confused about Wayland. Is it an X.org replacement or something different? And what are it's main benefits to what is currently being used?

[movieman]

I'm a bit confused about Wayland. Is it an X.org replacement or something different?

It's the new Messiah which will make Linux graphics wonderfully fast and bug-free.

Or, alternatively, it's an attempt to take some of the worst design choices from Windows and push them into Linux as well.

[TemplarGR]

It's the new Messiah which will make Linux graphics wonderfully fast and bug-free.

Or, alternatively, it's an attempt to take some of the worst design choices from Windows and push them into Linux as well.

LOL

No, in reality it is a little bit of both. In my (not so) humble opinion it tends to be more of the second than of the first.

There are many myths regarding Wayland. One of them is that somehow it will lead to increased performance, because it removes the server-client model. But this is simply not true. It removes significant funcionality for gaining almost nothing in return, except being "new". People tend to forget that just because code is old doesn't automatically mean it is of low quality.

I believe we will eventually find out in practice, which one is better. But if you are smart, you won't bet your money on X disappearing for a long time...

[damipereira]

AFAIK xorg is said to have lots of bugs and lots of dirty or bad legacy code, and that cleaning it would be really hard, and that making a new architecture with modern hardware in mind, the cleanest possible would be a good idea.
This is wayland as I see it, they , might be making bad choices (I absolutely don't know) but the idea it's not bad, maybe xorg is indeed "dirty", maybe it can just do with some cleaning, maybe it can't.
And about increased performance, I also think that is not totally right, but it should be easier to maintain.

[DanL]

Sensationalism works. (Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Reefer Madness, etc.).