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by toyg 4760 days ago
My issue with Wayland is that it risks being another KDE 4.0 (or another PulseAudio): the hype-machine was started too early in its development cycle and this is creating expectations that are then frustrated in practice. If you're trying to switch people en masse from such an entrenched technology, you must have a killer app ready from day 1. Is there an app that directly benefits from Wayland so much that it will entice people to switch?

I understand this sort of strategy is difficult in the OSS world, where development is mostly done in the open, but there's a difference between developing and evangelising.
3 comments
jmhain 4760 days ago
Check out this video of what Wayland can do with the Raspberry Pi GPU. People have tried and failed to get the same performance with X.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0UkU...

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exDM69 4760 days ago
This is a bit misleading because the RPi X drivers aren't very good and the performance is awful.

This is not to say that Wayland isn't an improvement, but with the RPi drivers it doesn't take much.

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tmzt 4759 days ago
Is there any reason why that approach wouldn't work on X? I read a few of the articles on it and seems like it could be implemented in X if somebody spent the time writing it.
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jmhain 4759 days ago
People have spent the time writing it, but it's still too buggy to be deployed. Somehow, it even has a tendency to actually corrupt the SD card. I'm not a GPU driver developer, so take this all with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that X is harder to support because it is such an unwieldy behemoth. Not only do you have to write kernel modules, but you have to write a user-space driver for X (known as a Device Dependent X or DDX driver).

With Wayland, the entire concept of a DDX driver disappears. There is a compositor backend that knows how to talk to the appropriate kernel module, and everything is happy. It's probably this reduced complexity that has made it so much easier to develop an accelerated user interface with Wayland than X.

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SimHacker 4760 days ago
X11 was pushed out the door too early, because some companies were threatening to standardize on X10, and they sure didn't want that to happen.

I attended the first X11 conference, and used X10 to develop pie menus and a window manager (based on UWM) that was extensible in Forth. http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/X10PieMenuWM.mov http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/fuwm-main.f

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vacri 4760 days ago
The problem is that the video system for your computer isn't just a commodity app, it's a huge, interoperative clump of software. It drives the primary interaction device on most computers, and that interaction is a complex beast on every level.

If it was something you could hack up in a basement in a couple of months, we'd already have dozens of choices.

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