"For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits - Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others - on which so many graphical applications already depend?"
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-07-06
I'm no Mac expert so I don't know what they are up to. The basic concept is to download TTF fonts (probably preprocessed) into the GPU. You then give the GPU a string of text and a rectangle in your coordinate system. As that rectangle is transformed by the display system the GPU would generate the best text possible (including subpixel rendering) without application involvement.
This is not giving the GPU a texture with the glyphs on it and then scaling. The GPU has the equations for the fonts, transforms those equations and then draws with subpixel antialiasing.
The problem being addressed is that apps can't do the antialaising if the window is going to be transformed in any way. Slightly transform the app's antialiased window and all of the antialiasing gets broken. We need a scheme where the drawing system does the transformation based antialiasing without application interaction.
There have about ten papers written on this subject but I didn't know anyone has deployed it.
Edited 2012-12-05 23:02 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
That's not really true, what about the DRI2 extension?
If you squint enough, DRI2 is very similar to Wayland which is not surprising as it is the same author.
Note also that in some environement (ARM, virtualisation) the GPU is very limited..
The car interface has stopped evolving, will the desktop UI still evolve a lot, possible but not likely.
Uh? What "large impact"? Slightly smoother fonts?
Member since:2005-07-06
Maybe not yet - autonomously driving cars are sort of a quite different concept, interface-wise.
Additionally, computerised dashboards are often quite horrible, there's a place for lots of improvement with them (they're often so bad that I wouldn't mind Apple focusing on the area, providing integrated solution for auto makers; with the influence of big & lavish US market on car designs, all would improve hopefully)
Member since:
2005-07-06
X basically ignores the GPU. Linux simply couldn't continue to ignore the GPU and remain competitive. Wayland turns the GPU into a first class citizen in the Linux world.
Nobody knows where this is going to end up. Usage of 3D in desktops is still in its infancy. I'm sure that in ten years we'll look back and laugh at these early desktop designs.
One technology that hasn't happened yet is GPU based glyph generation. When that happens it will likely have a large impact on the desktop.
Also note that 3D is just a catch all that includes compositing, GPGPU and other GPU based technology. It doesn't necessarily imply rotating cubes.