top | item 3807477

Wayland's X11 support is ready (An Experimental GNOME Shell Running On Wayland)

73 points| p4bl0 | 14 years ago |phoronix.com | reply

28 comments

order
[+] ek|14 years ago|reply
This is great news. Last August there was an article on Phoronix about KDE hoping to migrate to Wayland for SC 4.9:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wayla...

Hopefully in 2-3 months, when SC 4.9 is slated for release, we'll have KDE on Wayland. X is aging and is not very lightweight. Wayland brings some nice innovations, like eliminating the need to switch between VTs to differentiate X sessions.

The FAQ is also worth reading:

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

[+] agwa|14 years ago|reply
> Wayland brings some nice innovations, like eliminating the need to switch between VTs to differentiate X sessions.

Innovations like these (if not needing to switch VTs even counts as an innovation) pale in comparison to innovations like network transparency, which will be missing at first and eventually present but crippled in Wayland.

The ability to ssh to another system, launch a GUI app, and have it display on the system you're SSHing from has always set Unix+X apart from Windows and Mac OS. I can't believe this is being tossed aside so you can have cross-fades and rotating cubes when switching between sessions.

It's true that network transparency will be possible with Wayland, but it will be some sort of VNC-like pixel scraping approach, which has never worked as well as native X forwarding. Network transparency will be a second-class citizen in Wayland.

See http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2699657&cid=391... for some more disturbing problems with Wayland.

[+] Symmetry|14 years ago|reply
Interesting, but does Phoronix have some sort of editorial policy against every linking to primary sources?
[+] wmf|14 years ago|reply
I think he's actually reporting live from the whatever summit, so there's not much to link to. Generally Phoronix is much better than the mainstream tech press about linking.
[+] Tobu|14 years ago|reply
The Phoronix editor just recorded and uploaded video of the talk; that's original content.