The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013)

> when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. Daniel Stone[0] incredibly funny and educational talk[1] from 2013 could help many critics who missed the 3 decade long ongoing discussion of why X is bad . We've talked about this already in the mid 90ies (when there were no alternatives) and now 8 years after this popular linux.conf.au talk, people still having troubles understanding why X has always been a terrible tradeoff for both security and performance (well for literally everything). [0] link [1] The Real Story Behind Wayland and X ▶ this video edit: BUT X IS THE UNIX WAY! << so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well?

Mandatory video to watch for all X fans: > Daniel Stone ~ The real story behind Wayland and X' ▶ this video

I remember finding this video enlightening, a talk on the subject by someone who has worked on both X and Wayland: ▶ this video

Daniel Stone actually did a talk involving much of the same subject matter called "The Real Story behind Wayland and X". I'd recommend that over this article (which was partially written by the same guy). He's actually a really charismatic speaker. ▶ this video

Don't take it from me, Daniel Stone has a whole talk on the motivation for Wayland: ▶ this video Broadly, the X Server has a bunch of capabilities which are irrelevant. The modern model is really Window <-> Compositor based, and the X Server protocol is just a pointless middle man in that exchange.

> I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? This 12 years old video explains it better than anything I ever seen: ▶ this video

> Screenshots/recording should have been on the board from day one and they could have gotten to standardizing on how to handle them in oh 2013-2015? I agree that Wayland's development has taken far too long and the transition has been rocky. But what development team couldn't use more funding? Ubuntu throwing a tantrum after the ecosystem rejected Mir and not contributing to Wayland certainly didn't help. > What other OS makes you think about display servers? I am sympathetic to arguments that Wayland/Weston could provide more functionality out-of-the-box. The bazaar's fragmented mess of "desktop environments" is certainly not a strength compared to what the Cathedrals have produced. But Linux's uniquely modular GUI stack necessitates coordination across lots of projects to develop and adopt standards. But not doing anything and sticking with X11 would have condemned us to being stuck with an insecure, buggy, and visually glitchy mess forever. > Red Hat doesn't believe in the Linux ecosystem I have my qualms with Red Hat too, but my point was that Wayland was created by Xorg developers because they tried and failed to make X11 competitive. Seriously, just go watch this XFree86/Xorg/Wayland developer's talk [1]. [1]: ▶ this video

This talk "The Real Story Behind Wayland and X" by Daniel Stone (a longtime X developer) may debunk some misconceptions in this thread: ▶ this video

No. It's already basically feature-complete as compared to which parts of X11 are actually used these days[1]. X11 is burdened by absurdly obsolete extensions like drawing stippled lines, a font server, etc. See the talk by Daniel Stone[2] if you're interested in the kind of crud that's been cleared out. It's basically the kind of stuff that we will never go back to wanting in any type of server process. The trade-off between bandwidth and latency has changed fundamentally in basically all areas of computing, but especially anything to do with graphics. [1] Alright, there might be a few bits and bobs that are missing, but nothing major as witnessed by the very article under discussion. [2] ▶ this video

"X isn't network transparent anymore" according to Daniel Stone (longtime X.org and Wayland developer): ▶ this video If you use X11 forwarding with any application that uses a modern toolkit (Gtk+ 3, Qt 5, maybe also Gtk+ 2 and Qt 4) you are just pushing uncompressed pixmaps over the wire, as a bad substitute for VNC/RDP/etc. Xpra adds image compression on top, AFAIK, so it should be slightly better. The entire video ( ▶ this video ) provides a good overview as to why people that have been working on X11 for many many years decided to start Wayland.

The larger idea this fits into is getting rid of X11 all together. The inevitable replacement is Wayland.* One of the challenges of such a switch will that once you start using wayland, you'll have some older applications that cant talk to wayland, you'd have to start an X server to run that old application. If you have a wayland session on your computer, you don't want to hit ctrl-alt-8 to switch over to an X session running that single application, and then switch back and forth to wayland to use every other program. It would be nice if there was a X server that worked as a wayland client and could put the X-only application on your wayland desktop. That's Xwayland. * For a better explanation on ditching X, and what Wayland is: see this talk from one of the X dudes working on Wayland ▶ this video

The Wayland people really sound like they know what they are talking about, based on decades of experience. See, for instance: ▶ this video Are these people designing a better answer to Wayland because it's really better, or because it always looks easy when you don't intimately understand the problem space? I honestly don't know, but it's a question I'd like answered before I get excited.