Submitted by Jesse Barnes has posted a screenshot showing two clocks implemented in Qt, drawn natively in Wayland, the next-generation display server.
Jesse Barnes has posted a screenshot showing two clocks implemented in Qt, drawn natively in Wayland, the next-generation display server.
Awesome stuff; hopefully this will translate into something that’ll replace the current Xorg within the next couple of years. It is depressing to see many operating systems who rely on Xorg being held back because of the current state of affairs.There are many operating systems that rely on Xorg that would really show their true power only if they had a way of providing a better way of the GUI being handled than the current situation.
your comment does not make sense. You have operating system at the bottom, X.org in the middle and window managers+GUI toolkits+desktop environments features dependent of their toolkits widget capabilities+other stuff.
X.org problems hinders stuff that sit ontop of it, not below it and operating systems are not supposed to expose their functionality to GUI applications and hence no operating system should be dependent and held back by X.
For the vast majority of end users the operating system experience starts at the GUI, if the GUI experience is crap then for all intents and purposes for the end user the operating system is crap. Please, next time, read the posts fully instead of scanning through in a hurry then firing off a post that doesn’t address a single issue I raised.
i read your post, couple of times and your post was a bit fuzzy on where things sit on a stack and i think i did a service to a reader who doesnt know where things sit by specifically mentioning them and where they sit on a stack.
This is a technical forum and use of appropriate technical terms should be advised where ever applicable. We all know or should know what a *nix OS is, we all know or should know where desktop environments exist in *nix systems and we all know or should what toolkits those desktop environments use. To be of service to those who are new and dont know, why not being specific to what pieces we are talking about and where they sit on a system stack?
Being fuzzy on our terms will only cause confusion to those who are in the know and will prolong the ignorance of those who want to know.
I figured a direct reply would be more helpful than a moderation.
There was absolutely nothing ambiguous about kaiwai’s post. Stop trying to defend yourself as an educator to the masses. You misinterpreted his first post and blew it up as if it were a life or death issue. Its not. No one was misled.
Although If you really feel strongly about the education of the masses, feel free to write a very comprehensive article about the different functions of an operating system ( with selected source code / flow charted examples from various system designs) as well as all of the layers on top that create a user interface. I’m certain such an article would be very welcome here.
You mean like kaiwai saying xorg when he meant xserver? People sometimes confuse the underlying framework/api with the components that sit on top of it.
I agree but when I refer to an ‘operating system’ I am looking at it from a holistic end users perspective and not zooming down into the nitty gritty of the operating system itself. We can sit around and talk about the technical merits of the low level parts of the operating system but they alone do not dictate how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ an operating system. The first thing the end user will see will be the graphic user interface, then they will experience how well the integration is between the user interface and the underlying operating system by how well it can handle automounting a thumb drive and so on.
Xorg provides the layer on which the the desktop resides, to the end user if Xorg fails to provide a good experience then the end user will evaluate that the whole operating system is faulty because of that one component. We have people who do the exact same thing when it comes to Windows – they write it off because of Internet Explorer or because of a dodgy third party driver yet we never see the rush to defence as you’ve done in the above post – why is that?
The experience at the top leads the end user to come to conclusions about how well the over all operating system functions – they aren’t going to sit back and go, “well, XOrg really sucks with the desktop residing on top really being held back but the underlying operating system is really awesome” – it just simply isn’t going to happen. If the first impressions are bad then it isn’t going to matter how good the low level parts of the operating system are, its evaluated as bad by the end user.
Microsoft did a whole video series at their hardware conference before Windows 7 came out about ‘spit and polish’ and actually getting third parties to give a crap about how their product performs on Windows. It isn’t going to matter if the hardware or software is provided by a third party – if the ‘computer isn’t doing what I want it’ (in layman’s terms) then they will come to the conclusion that Windows sucks. The same can be said when evaluating any operating system – end users do not differentiate between the different layers, the different suppliers, the different companies and so forth – if the computer isn’t doing what they want then it is the fault of the operating system.
Edited 2010-09-22 01:51 UTC
Xorg doesn’t need to be replaced, its x11 that needs to be deprecated, and the lead developers of Wayland are working for Xorg and wayland uses the same new graphic driver model that Xorg/x11 uses. We don’t need rivality, we need cooperation, and idealy Xorg could adopt Wayland as the new recomended protocol for GUI toolkits and supply a rootless X11 on top of wayland for legacy application.
Correct, I should have said ‘xserver’ instead of Xorg considering that Wayland is replacing xserver rather than the ‘whole stack’. Hopefully it’ll translate very soon in an Xorg release that will have xserver completely replaced.
Not to sound like a broken record or anything, but I’m sure that the Y-Windows project could use some developmental assistance from anyone who’s still fed up with X-Windows. Perhaps you should take a look: http://y-windows.org
It looks interesting, but is how portable is it going to be? It would be nice to have a lighter Xserver, but if it’s going to be 75% broken on the BSDs, is that better?
It rely on KMS, so OpenBSD will probably have it before other BSD. For now, Linux will be alone. But those OS will have the choice to continue with XFree86 or Xorg. Wayland use Mesa, Gallium3D and X drivers. Improvments there will improve X too.
I seem to recall that FreeBSD was working on KMS too.
A small correction: Wayland can not use Gallium currently (though it theoretically could), and it doesn’t use X drivers, just Mesa for rendering and KMS for display management.
The really great thing about Wayland is that it is the first new display server that doesn’t need its own drivers. Unfortunately, the NVIDIA blob will probably be one of the major things holding it back (sorry, but Nouveau will not ever be good enough for gaming). Personally, I would like to see NVIDIA abstract their driver away from X, and just implement EGL, OpenGL, OpenVG, VDPAU, and a mode setting API such as OpenSC or the DRM API. This would give X.org developers more freedom with their internal API, and would make alternative display servers like Wayland possible.
Some wild stuff here:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODYxNA