22 Feb
2011
22 Feb
'11
9:50 p.m.
Excerpts from Paul Davis's message of 2011-02-22 17:57:44 +0100:
On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Philipp Überbacher
<hollunder(a)lavabit.com> wrote:
The 'remove X cruft' is the most tangible aspect for me (if it means
actually reducing complexity).
The rest sounds nice, and it might well be that X has become old, but I
don't see the big improvement coming up. Windows are called surfaces
now, can have different shapes and are more flexible, compositing,
transformations, I got that bit, but I don't see the UI improvement.
I've seen the demos with shapes flying around the desktop, I've seen
the conventional compositing window managers and wayland will probably
do all that and more, but I don't see the improvement in User
Interfaces. I see fancy effects that are good for a couple of 'wow,
looks cool' moments, but I can't see an improvement in usability coming
up. Maybe I'm just not enough of a visionary to see the great things
that will be possible but I'd sure like to see examples of User
Interfaces that will really benefit from it. I want to see things that
weren't possible before, real improvements for the user, not just
eye candy.
Again, I do hope that it will reduce complexity, code complexity,
difficulties with UI coding, etc. rather than increasing them. If it
will achieve that then it will be an improvement. Sadly though things
tend to become more complex. We'll see how it'll pan out, wayland in ~5
years or X for another decade. I haven't made many predictions yet, I
still dare to make them :).
I'm not sure it helps to talk about wayland,
it seems to be very much
future music. It seems ubuntu and fedora talk about a year or so, but
after reading up about its current state (three years of development so
far, pretty much proof of concept, working with some drivers only,
crashing all over the place in the video demos) it seems to me that five
years is a more realistic estimate (rather longer if we talk about
replacing X). Just my guess, but it seems far from being in a reliably
working state, so it's future music.
Also, I don't see what's supposed to be so great about it, besides
removing X11 cruft.
it does a lot more than "remove xcruft". it moves *nix display
technology into a modern era in which everything is just a drawing
surface that gets composited and along the way can be subject to
arbitrary transformation. rather than insist on the type of h/w
abstraction that X uses, which is fundamentally based on display
technology from 20 years ago, it uses an abstraction that is largely
h/w independent even if it relies on h/w to get the best performance
from the rendering model. you are not drawing to "windows", and you
don't have a "rectangle on the screen" under your control: you render
to a surface which will be composited into the frame buffer (possibly
with vblank sync, a concept that X really cannot export because of
network transparency).
another way to look at it is to take any sensible drawing API: Cairo,
PostScript, CoreDraw ... extract the core concepts behind the way they
relate drawing to a result ... now make that into the display server.
like JACK, don't provide very much access to the h/w concepts at all,
but instead provide a powerful, abstract model that is actually *more*
capable and flexible than working at the level of "what the hardware
does".
of course, you have to add event handling too, but wayland's approach
to this is also much more in line with contemporary technology than
X's fundamental models of input devices and so forth.
i agree that its a way from becoming the standard thing, but i'm
convinced that something like wayland is what we will all be on in a
few years.
--p