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

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. [VIDEO]

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

> 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 [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' [VIDEO]

The Wayland people really sound like they know what they are talking about, based on decades of experience. See, for instance: [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.

Here's a good video explaining some of X's problems: [VIDEO] Long story short: the X11 protocol (which Xorg/X is an implementation of) was created in 1980, and was made for drawing stuff like this: [LINK] The important distinction between X and any modern display server is that nowadays we separate compositor (that which composites application content into what you see on the display) and toolkit (that which draws text boxes, buttons, progress bars etc.) into two. X was designed to do both these things. This isn't practical for several reasons. So far people have worked around this issue, but many feel it's time to stop working around it (since the X codebase is a complete mess due to this "working around"), and develop something from scratch that does what we want for a modern desktop in 2013.

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 [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] [VIDEO]