An anonymous reader writes
"A belated holiday gift for Linux users is the X.Org Server 1.15 'Egg Nog' release. X.Org Server 1.15 presents new features including DRI3 — a big update to their rendering model — a rewrite of the GLX windowing system code, support for Mesa Mega Drivers, and many bug fixes plus polishing. The release, though, goes without any mainline support for XWayland to ease the adoption of the Wayland Display Server while maintaining legacy X11 application support."
In a country far away and long ago....
By hlub
•
2013-Dec-29 07:38
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
In a country long ago and far away there lived the good King X the eleventh.
He had a lot of ministers, the most important of which had become the minister of Composition. His job was to have peoples houses painted. If you wanted your house painted, you would have to ask the King. Every day the king would spend long hours with the minister of Composition, who would know all the houses in the country, had an exact knowledge of the Royal Paint Budget, and could call in the painters.
Although almost everyone lived in the capital called Localhost the King would sometimes travel around the country and kindly hear peoples paint requests. Every night the King would return to his palace, talk to the minister of Composition, and then decide whether you could have your house painted, and when.
Then on a dark winter's night, a group of grumpy people thought how much more efficient it would be if everyone would talk to the minister of Composition directly. Thus the Wayland Conspiracy was born. The next day, at daybreak, they deposed the good King and made the minister of Composition the head of state: president Compositor. To cater for the few people in remote villages they re-appointed the King as secratary to the president: the Secretary for Remote Villages. He would still travel around the country (albeit in a suit, and without his crown). He would still talk to president Compositor every night, like in the old days.
The press in other counties, like Windonia and Applestan, were very positive: finally this backward country had a modern government. Now its poor inhabitants could have the same beautiful colored houses they had. Welcome to the modern world!
The people in the country itself didn't notice a lot of difference, however. In the old days things took a little longer, but not everyone needs his house painted every day. Many still called the Secretary for Remote Villages "King", especially in the countryside.
But the people in Windonia and Applestan were very satisfied: they always had felt that their geovernment was superior, and the Wayland revolution had proved their point.
The King just smiled.
Re:Good!
By adolf
•
2013-Dec-29 08:18
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
Really? Lots of configuration?
Last time I ran an X11 application remotely, I used SSH with X forwarding with a simple command line. Worked great. (Flawless, I might say.)
Last time I ran a multi-headed X box (where multi-head == "two or more independent monitors+keyboards+mice, each with their own root window and window manager"), the configuration wasn't trivial, but it wasn't hard either. And once it was done, any X11 "server" could connect to this "client" and run any program over 100-mbps Ethernet. (Look, ma! A terminal server! Hot-desking! Remote access! THE CLOUD! Buzzword-bingo on the end of a 20-year-old carrot!)
And it doesn't much matter when the "last time" was, since the methods haven't changed a bit over the past decade or two.
These are things that other graphical systems cannot do. And they are the reasons why X, or perhaps X11, is still important.
Those who do not understand X, are doomed to recreate it. Badly.
Re:or, do the opposite
By serviscope_minor
•
2013-Dec-29 08:23
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
You are insignificant in the face of our needs.
Back in the olden days of the Windows versus Linux flamewars--when it still mattered and OSX didn't exist, this was exactly the sort of arguments the Windows people used to make about Linux features.
Then the attitude was hackish and anything you could do seemed reasonable/fun/cool because, why insult what another user wants to do? It's their system after all. That sort of attitude was why a lot of us came to Linux and OSS in the first place.
It's sad to see that "begone you insignificant peon" is now infiltating the OSS culture. Please leave. Regardless of the merits of this particular fight, your attitude is total poison. Take it somewhere it can't do any damage.
Re:or, do the opposite
By DarkOx
•
2013-Dec-29 08:36
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
Wow such stunning lack of vision. You and a bunch of other people latched on to this network transparency is to pricey a feature conception back in the late 90's and just can't let it go.
Let me clue you in. In Computing everything that is old is new again. We move back and fourth between centralization and decentralization. The current direction of things is toward centralization again. Just listen to people who keep saying cloud, PC over IP, and visualization. Then consider all the tablet and not quite designed to be a standalone machine hardware/software stacks being sold.
Windows got a leg up from being on the right spot of the curve at the right time. They built a comparatively simple localized talk directly to the hardware display solution during the decentralization trend. That served very well in the late 90's and early 2000's when everyone was focused on doing CAD and playing video games on their desktops. The hardware has gotten faster and the work around hacked into X.org have allowed it to mostly keep up though. Now the fact is the X.org model is broken too, modern toolkits are not using the drawing primatives and spend most of their time doing what amounts to pushing bitmaps around which does not offer really great network transparency. X.org needs a major rework; X11 was a solution for a slightly different set of problems than we have today, but just because it might not be the right specific solution now, does not be something else automatically is or that the fundamental concepts behind X are wrong.
Network transparency is NOT a misfeature and its NOT a niche use case.
Citrix and others are falling all over themselves right now trying to figure out how to export a rich application experiences from Microsoft's shitty non network transparent desktop and server platform backed by powerful hardware to Apple, and Microsoft's shitty tablet platforms. Xenprise is all about application network transparency; because people can't/don't want to try and deal with local storage and computation on their tablets.
If you want the UNIX/Linux world to enjoy the sort of success Windows did in the 95-2005 years its about catering to the centralization, decentralization cycle and having a modern ( ie not X11, but maybe an X12) display solution that is hardware independent, portable, and network transparent absolutely is the thing to do. Plan for 2015 - 2025 rather than trying to implement the ideas and compromises of 1995. Wayland and Mir are backward looking.
Re: Good!
By TheRaven64
•
2013-Dec-29 08:56
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
I really don't understand the reason for pulseaudio in the first place, I heard that when wanting to change and modify their sound system in (was it?) freebsd? they just updated the audio driver, they didnt include some ridiculously slow, horrible to setup daemon to do it
There's a lot of history involved. OSS was originally contributed to Linux under the GPL, then to *BSD under the BSDL. It was maintained in both, but then the original author took it commercial. FreeBSD just forked the last BSDL version and kept maintaining compatibility with new versions. Linux ripped it out and replaced it with the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).
One of the drawbacks with early OSS was that you had a single /dev/dsp and so only one application could play sound at once. With ALSA, you still only had one /dev/dsp, but if your card did hardware mixing, and you rewrite your applications to use ALSA, then you could get mixing. Unfortunately, most things weren't rewritten to use ASLA and most cheap cards back then didn't do hardware mixing, so userspace sound daemons started appearing. Unfortunately, GNOME and KDE each had their own (incompatible) ones. Meanwhile, FreeBSD just implemented in-kernel sound mixing.
Over 10 years ago, this was why I switched to FreeBSD. I wanted XMMS to play music and my KDE IM client and GNOME mail client to be able to make notification bings, and maybe have a game in the foreground playing sound. This was trivial with FreeBSD, impossible with Linux. Now, it's possible with Linux, but only by requiring every single audio-playing app (or, at least, library) to be rewritten with the Linux fad-of-the-day API. This underlines the philosophical difference between FreeBSD and Linux, and is why I remain a FreeBSD user.