Re: [dev] Wayland vs X11

From: Silvan Jegen <s.jegen_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2016 20:33:39 +0200

Heyho

On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 06:27:49PM +0200, FRIGN wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Aug 2016 18:04:20 +0200
> patrick295767 patrick295767 <patrick295767_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey Patrick,
>
> > Do you believe that Wayland will replace X11 one day? ;)
>
> this is a tough question to answer. If we are headed on the current
> course, I think we will face even more difficult times in the future
> with worse monocultures than we have today (systemd, Gnome, ...).
>
> > Besides, don't you believe that Ubuntu may have time to time some
> > negative influence on Linux phylosophy?
>
> Is this a rhetorical question?
>
> > Quote:
> > Display server expert Daniel Stone explains what is really happening
> > with the future of graphical display protocols on Linux. So far as
> > most Linux users are concerned, Wayland is the project that is
> > eventually supposed to replace the X Window System (X).
>
> Here's the thing: Wayland really does not make a complete stack, it
> merely is a very thin protocol which allows the talk between clients and
> between client and compositor. Everything else (rendering, buffer
> management, input management, ...) that used to be handled by X.org in
> a reasonable manner is now pushed to each compositor. So if

One can argue that having a simple protocol *is* the suckless part of
Wayland (dont forget Xprint[0] :P). The Wayland protocol also does not
allow for communication between clients directly[1] but only through
the Wayland compositor.

I see two main issues that stem from switching to Wayland.

1. With Wayland there will be no non-compositing desktop.
2. Since rendering is done client-side and there is no Xlib, it may be
   harder to get pixel on your screen if you don't want to use one of the
   big GUI libraries like Qt or GTK2/3/++/whatev.

As a non-expert in this space I am not sure the Wayland future is looking
that bleak though.

Velox[2] does not look bloated to me and wayland-enabled st[3] is only
barely larger than the current X11 version's git tip (though the wayland
version depends on wld[4]).


Cheers,

Silvan


[0] ftp://www.x.org/pub/X11R6.8.1/doc/Xprint.7.html
[1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html
[2] https://github.com/michaelforney/velox
[3] https://github.com/michaelforney/st
[4] https://github.com/michaelforney/wld
Received on Tue Aug 02 2016 - 20:33:39 CEST

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