[rwmj]

I went to a talk about Wayland at FOSDEM. What was most interesting was that everything they are trying to solve has already been solved by X. Furthermore, the only possible benefit of Wayland (rotating windows in non 90 degree amounts) is basically a bug, not a feature.

Then there's the lack of network support.

If this is pushed on Linux users, expect forking of distributions.

[pilif]

This goes to show that it's practically impossible to do it right. At one point there are the purists who complain about bloat. At the other point, there are the purists complaining about NIH when you try to remove the bloat.

You can't have it both in this case it seems.

As a user I know one thing: X11 is huge and while it has all the nice features, it's also still a slow and laggy beast. This might be caused by bad drivers, or it might be caused by a bad architecture (or bad drivers caused by bad architecture making it impossibly hard to write good drivers).

As such, I'm curious to see whether a restart based on technology newer than the 80ies might solve the two big issues I'm having with Unix GUI at this point.

If it does, I'm happy.

If it doesn't, I'll be on the lookout for a better solution.

But I know one thing: If a long-year X11 developer (Kristian Høgsberg is working on the xorg x server) tells us that our issues are practically impossible to fix without a rewrite using a different architecture, then I believe them. Why?

Because for them it would likely be much less work to fix the existing thing (especially if it is nearly 30 years old and as such should be very mature and bug-free), so if they prefer a rewrite, there must be some truth to that.

Personally, I don't care about either bloat (unless said bloat leads to other issues than me having to buy a bit more RAM and diskspace) or NIH, but I still to this day haven't found a Linux distribution that has a GUI which works as-well as OSX or Windows (window drawing issues, multi monitor support - heck - just changing resolutions at times), so I'm certainly open to see other paths explored.

[rwmj]

I simply don't have this problem of X being slow or laggy, so I cannot comment on the rest.

(Edit: I use XFCE, not GNOME)

[microtonal]

I use both OS X and Ubuntu. In comparison, Ubuntu is terribly slow, even on basic things such as dragging and resizing windows, let alone graphically-intense applications. This is both with ATI's proprietary drivers and the opensource radeon driver. Things are a bit better if I don't use a compositing window manager.

I am not sure who is to blame, X or the drivers. But most users won't care. They'll see that GNU/Linux has a bad desktop experience, and revert to whatever they were using.

[rwmj]

I'm using Intel hardware on a large display, and of course Intel makes all the information available to driver writers and the X drivers are open source and very high quality. And there is no lag. I used to use Mac OS X before and there's no difference.

So this sample of two users seems to indicate that your problem is with drivers. Wayland will make no difference to your experience of Ubuntu.

[billiob]

Please try bodhilinux with enlightenment as window manager and you'll see that gnome/unity are slow, not X.

[FooBarWidget]

The point of Wayland isn't doing new things that weren't poissible before, it's doing things in a better and more efficient way. Less lines of code, dropping support ancient unused stuff, etc. In other words, reducing technical debt.

[hasenj]

I would take it further and say: the real problem that Wayland is solving is X.

[Tuna-Fish]

> I went to a talk about Wayland at FOSDEM. What was most interesting was that everything they are trying to solve has already been solved by X.

This is because Wayland is meant to be a subset of the functionality of X. It's not meant to do new things, it's meant to strip off 3 decades worth of cruft that is of little value today.

Note that Wayland is not ran by a bunch of random people who decided that X sucks and that they can do better -- a vast majority of the commits are by veteran X developers.

[coffeeaddicted]

I'm doing occasionally some cross-platform development using Windows API and X11 and what I hope mostly for is that Wayland will reduce the complexity when programming compared to what is needed for X. Even simply things get complicated on X11 due to the client&server communication. A simple call to check the cursor-position can freeze your application for several milliseconds when the server decides to ignore your client for a few frames (and yes, depending on the application that matters - for games it's really annoying). Or adding copy&paste support will send you through a hell of no-longer-working examples and you can find lots of custom implementation where no 2 people tried the same workaround to ensure they really wait long enough for the server to respond and filter the right messages. I think the X people are also working on improving the situation when client&server are on the same system, but unfortunately you never can really ignore that communication completely and it will probably be many years before older X11 systems out there can safely be ignored.

I realize many people care a lot about the network part of X11. I suppose especially if you are working as Sysop it might be a big deal. I've not used it for over a decade, so obviously not something I care about so much. But on the programming side that client&server split makes life a lot harder and is not a solved problem.