Wayland 1.0 Stable Release Is Imminent

[89c51]

He said that screen cloning is useless. He seems to live in an alternate reality in that everybody is fine with a black screen on the notebook…

Apart of what he thinks the user MUST have: Cloned screen, extended screen, different workspace on different screen and maybe some more that i cant think from the top of my head.

All these should be also easily configurable with a well designed GUI.

Lots. Only the APIs will be stable, not the software itself.

I expect them to keep working on weston, and maybe have it as the one and only compositor with input from the DE guys instead of everyone doing its own thing, but the protocol itself??? Maybe they'll merge the things openismus does with the text but after that??

[Ericg]

I expect them to keep working on weston, and maybe have it as the one and only compositor with input from the DE guys instead of everyone doing its own thing, but the protocol itself??? Maybe they'll merge the things openismus does with the text but after that??

The developers have made it very clear: Weston is only a reference implementation. If you want to use it as THE compositor that is fine, but it is not what they are expecting or wanting people to do. Kwin is to be a Wayland compositor, Mutter is to be a Wayland compositor, Compiz is to be a Wayland compositor assuming the project isnt killed from now until Ubuntu ships Wayland by default. This way they can each do their own thing, they can each experiment in their own ways and see what works instead of just having ONE implementation that may or may not be the best way to do things.

[asdx]

As an end user? Not a whole lot. X is being replaced for a lot of reasons but some of the big ones are: Break the forced backwards compatibility. X used to do a lot of things, many of those things (font rendering, memory management, and a few hundred other things) have since been moved to other, smaller, programs or into the kernel. BUT, some programs still depend on X being able to do those things so they have to stay in the server. Thats why you hear people talking about X12-- its an oppurtunity for the developers to just go "F*ck backwards compatibility" and break as much stuff as they want to modernize the X server.

Unfortunately X is like a brand. And you have to support a lot of stupid stuff to be able to say you speak the "X protocol" so the protocol would either have to be updated (not likely as itd make BSD and Solaris no longer be X compatible) So the only option remaining is a new protocol: Wayland.

Wayland is meant to do something X was never meant to do--- get out of the way. Let the kernel, let the toolkits, let the drivers do their thing and dont have the big bad bouncer that is X in the middle of things saying "No you cant do that because 20 years ago we hadnt thought of that"

A nice little side affect of this will be more portable toolkits. GTK and QT and KDElibs and EFL will have to support X and Wayland at the same time because some users will be on X, some on Wayland, that means the libraries cant care about what protocol they are speaking--it has to be abstracted away. This way, if 10 years from now we decide that Wayland was great for 2012 but not so great for 2022, hopefully moving to a new backend will be easier because the toolkits ALREADY have to be fairly backend agnostic.

You mean Qt.

QT == QuickTime.

[89c51]

The developers have made it very clear: Weston is only a reference implementation. If you want to use it as THE compositor that is fine, but it is not what they are expecting or wanting people to do. Kwin is to be a Wayland compositor, Mutter is to be a Wayland compositor, Compiz is to be a Wayland compositor assuming the project isnt killed from now until Ubuntu ships Wayland by default. This way they can each do their own thing, they can each experiment in their own ways and see what works instead of just having ONE implementation that may or may not be the best way to do things.

I expect the DEs to use weston with some added functionality at least in the beginning. If i remember well it suports plugins and DEs can use that to add stuff they want. That if they want to move to WL quickly. I expect ubuntu to follow that route.

We ll see. Nice and interesting things are coming for linux.

[Awesomeness]

Apart of what he thinks the user MUST have: Cloned screen, extended screen, different workspace on different screen and maybe some more that i cant think from the top of my head.

If I understood the talk correctly currently only cloned screens are not possible and even in that case he did not rule out that the feature will be added at some point.

All these should be also easily configurable with a well designed GUI.

Not really a task for Wayland. GUIs are other people’s job.

[boast]

Already got my Xorg ready for uninstallation!

[garegin]

to clear the air. wayland doesn't have to be more capable than x11 to be better. it's a better, more efficient protocol. this kind of stuff happens all the time where software stack is redesigned to be more modern/efficient. this is because computer scientists discover better/more efficient ways to get things done.

[Dami55an]

Some things are probabl;y more efficient but as an end user you might not feel them.

[smitty3268]

If I understood the talk correctly currently only cloned screens are not possible and even in that case he did not rule out that the feature will be added at some point.

Cloned screens should be extremely simple in Wayland - you already have everything in a texture, so you just have to display that same texture on the other output screen. He's just not interested in adding that feature into Weston, but obviously Kwin, Mutter, and Compiz will.

[Redi44]

Sooo, if I understand it correctly this is an Intel project. And from NVidia & ATI (AMD) PR we will never see blobs supporting this...

So my question is: How will it work lets say with Ubuntu 13.10 and AMD 7XXX GPUs? Will I be forced to use the OSS drivers, or is there some backwards compatibility in this with X.org? I'm asking because I want to buy a new GPU (AMD Dual Graphics maybe) and I would like to keep them using even on 13.10, 14.04 etc....