Ubuntu moving towards Wayland

Adam Jackson ajax at redhat.com
Tue Nov 9 16:55:55 UTC 2010


On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 04:05 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:

> +1 for bringing these points up. No offense to krh (because it's nice
> technology) but you can pull my genuine networked applications from my
> cold dead hands. I agree that I see this ongoing trend to move toward
> things that are fluffy and pretty at the cost of flexibility.

No.  You see the system you know and understand being replaced by one
you don't.  You have an emotional attachment to the old system because
it gives you a feature you like and the dozens of problems with it
aren't important to you.  And you claim that the replacement is less
flexible because you don't understand or don't want to learn the new
thing.

You are, in short, scared.

It's well established by now that the problems of "window system",
"rendering system", "input system", and "application remoting" are in
fact pretty dang separate, and that the more you conflate them the worse
your solution ends up being.  You can thank X for being ~24 years of
research into just how badly you can conflate them and get away with it,
but it's just about reached the limits of what it can do.  I'm sad to
see it go too, but I've been working to knock X out of hegemony for the
last six years, and I'm quite sure that the sooner that happens the
better for all concerned.

Remoting a wayland application is _trivial_.  Either to an X or to a
wayland view system.  It's hard to make wayland remoting less flexible
than X over the network, since the natural remoting level (surface
updates) is basically stateless unlike X's sixteen complete IPC
interfaces, and unlike X you're actually guaranteed that the window
surfaces exist and have meaningful content.  So you get the
long-lusted-for "screen for X" almost for free.

- ajax
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