AMD Catalyst Will Not Support Wayland Anytime Soon

[89c51]

I was under the impression that the major players are adopting a mildly optimistic "wait-and-see" strategy, actually.

The number of people regularly contributing to Wayland is tiny. I don't mind the slow pace, if they are really going to completely re-arrange the way GUI works on Linux, I'd rather that they get it right than rush something half-baked. The major (promised) advantages of Wayland are primarily infrastructural -- cleaner code, less cruft, more direct interfaces, the actual benefits for the end-user will not be huge performance improvements (all relevant stuff like 3d and GUI toolkits can bypass X almost completely already), but hopefully more stability and reliability. And this takes TIME.

I believe that it will offer a more polished experience for the end user. No blinking screens during bootup and that stuff. I think it can also be started early in the boot process so it might make things feel a bit faster (from start button to login screen) . Maybe it can even reduce the mess with the blobs since its a more simple interface i think .

Intel is behind it, Tizen uses it and i think meego/MerProject () , Canonical will use it, Qt people have things done etc. I don't think this will die.

We now wait for the DE people to get things done in order to have full DE on it. And of course apps are not there.

[jrch2k8]

I'll say it again: Wayland does not feature serious improvements for the end user. It's just for the code monkeys to have something to masturbate over. It's just so programmers feel good reinventing the wheel of course using the "this time we will design it better" mantra, where design is something they don't really bother to define so that it means whatever they want it to mean.

have you read the wayland protocol??

you have any sort of idea of the difference between wayland and X11??

you understand why wayland propose such a radical change of POV compared to the X11 paradigm[well OS X did something similar]?

"It's just so programmers feel good reinventing the wheel of course using the "this time we will design it better" mantra, where design is something they don't really bother to define so that it means whatever they want it to mean" <---WTF?? http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html [you google kung-fu is weak]and in http://wayland.freedesktop.org you can find FAQs, mailing list and the actual source code amazing right?

i guess you are another less bash about something you don't understand just for the sake of posting?

ofc when wayland reaches 1.0 release it won't save kittens from trees and cure the cancer or help in the discover of cold fussion cuz as any software developers need time to adapt to the new way.

about games wayland is not a game engine nor is opengl implementation because that is mesa/libgl work not wayland or X11[dunno how somebody related this 2 things togheter but well] about wine is another story but in the 2d section[wine or not 3d is handled by mesa/libgl] cuz a smart implementation could help a lot the performance rendering of wine[Qt/GTK/e17/etc too] due to wayland flexibility and modern GPU capabilities, read wayland site and try to figure out why!!

[bug77]

I don't know, it seems reasonable.

Simpler code is easier to maintain, and all the important stuff has been moving out of X for decades: GUI, 3D, modesetting, font management... Lots of stuff in X is very rarely used and it would make sense to move it into an optional (but still available!!!!) codepath, in order to keep the daily bread and butter simple and maintainable.

At the same time, there's a community around X vs a few developers around Wayland. A cleaner code base is definitely desirable, but it doesn't come for free, unfortunately. It's only going to be a bumpy road in the beginning though, new contributors will more likely choose the project with a lower entry barrier.

[russofris]

Since we all know what Wayland is and does, one of the stock questions I set out to answer was "What problems does Wayland intend solve for users and developers"?

I'll post when I find an answer. Meanwhile, the LWN articles are fairly interesting.

http://lwn.net/Articles/415589/
http://lwn.net/Articles/491509/
http://lwn.net/Articles/481490/

F

[daniels]

I'll say it again: Wayland does not feature serious improvements for the end user. It's just for the code monkeys to have something to masturbate over. It's just so programmers feel good reinventing the wheel of course using the "this time we will design it better" mantra, where design is something they don't really bother to define so that it means whatever they want it to mean.

If that's the case, then I really do wonder what your forum posts are.

[bug77]

If that's the case, then I really do wonder what your forum posts are.

I think this thread has had enough ranting already. Your point of view as an X developer would be a welcomed addition.

[daniels]

Ha. The tag line's actually a little inaccurate, since I've been working completely on Wayland all year, and haven't really done much for X since (except revive and merge some old patchsets).

I think Wayland's really good, and has a lot of promise. It's a fundamentally different approach to X in a number of ways: the server/compositor split, having the interfaces be descriptive rather than prescriptive (e.g. 'this window is a popup', rather than 'place this window exactly here and give me all input until I tell you otherwise' - which is the reason you still can't use media keys or have your screensaver trigger with a popup open in X in 2012), the concept of a frame being first class, etc. A lot of Wayland was strongly inspired by a lot of extensions to X (DRI2, Xi2, et al), but the reality is that there are some things in core X that we just can't fix with extensions, ever.

X isn't a bad system, not at all. But X was designed for 1985, not 2012, and the problem now is that there's just a huge mismatch between what modern toolkits and apps try to do, and what X lets you do, that everything we've been doing for the last few years has been trying to get around X's core design principles. Some of those were quite successful, some of those less so, and some of those work fine but at a huge cost. If you look at how X is used these days, mostly it's as a very expensive IPC mechanism between clients and the window manager/compositor, trying to very painfully synchronise every step, and also trying to work around things like X trying to automatically draw for you. Very, very little of X is actually used.

Of course, X isn't going to die: not this year, not next year, not in 2015. It's always going to be there, and that's one of the reasons why XWayland is being pushed as a first-class integrated solution. I'm sure it's got some life in it, but we've now got to the stage where it takes a gargantuan amount of effort within X to make very slight improvements, and personally I feel that I'm better off putting that effort into Wayland, where we can see pretty huge improvements for much less effort. Working in the mobile space as well, a lot of our customers have UI requirements which we simply can't ever fulfill with X - at least not without #ifdef'ing chunks out of the server and making it technically non-compliant. That, and I've been working on X for ten years, and they say change is as good as a holiday.

That's my opinion, anyway. I don't buy into all the polarised tribal bullshit, nor the notion that it's a zero-sum game and one must improve to the detriment to the other. Wayland exists precisely because of what we've all been doing within X.Org for the past few years (a lot of it with the express goal of making it easier to develop other window systems, on the grounds that the total lack of competition was deeply unhealthy for the whole system), and as many people have noted before, a lot of Wayland contributors (including Kristian himself) have long backgrounds as X developers. We all still go to the same conferences, work together on the same lists and the same code, and share the same goal of pushing open source window systems further.

As for AMD and NVIDIA, well, they write the blob for people who buy enterprise/industrial workstations by the tens of thousands of GPUs, not for the Phoronix forums. So until those customers start demonstrating interest in Wayland, then I wouldn't expect to see anything in the blobs.

[bug77]

Well, there's a nice informative post, thank you very much.
If only it could be made into a sticky. Or maybe Michael can post a link to this in his every article about Wayland