Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Will Default To The X.Org Stack, Not Wayland (phoronix.com) 194
An anonymous reader writes: Five years after their original goal to ship Ubuntu with Wayland, Ubuntu 17.10 transitioned to using the Wayland display system by default as part of their transition to GNOME Shell as the default desktop. But with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release, Canonical has decided to transition back to the X.Org Server. Their reasoning for moving to an X.Org Server by default is better support for screen sharing, remote desktop, and better recovery from crashes. But for those interested the Wayland session will still be available as a log-in option.
See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:2, Interesting)
Really, these things swing back and forth and really is a non-news item. The headline should be changed to read: Defaults to X.org Allows Choice of Wayland. Which is not really newsworthy.
In other words, "Meh."
Re:See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:5, Insightful)
"Which is not really newsworthy."
Well it is actually. Various vested interests have been plying the X Windows is dead, Wayland is the way forward line for a few years now. For Ubuntu - a distro not exactly known for its conservatism and aversion to releasing bleeding edge sofware - to return to X as the default graphics system is a pretty obvious statement that Wayland is a long way from being ready for prime time.
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Canonical's Shelf of Broken Dreams is well stocked. It's just one more in a long line of abysmal, over-ambitious failures. However it can still be argued Wayland is still in a Failure-in-Waiting status.
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Canonical announced dumping Wayland quite some time ago, so this isn't news at all. It was too tough for them, and couldn't be rectified with their new best friends, Microsoft.
It was over-promised, then never-delivered.... although it's only one of the few Canonical failures.
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Various vested interests have been plying the X Windows is dead, Wayland is the way forward line for a few years now.
And they are right for the use cases they presented. Unfortunately those use cases do not overlap with the use cases of those who jump only between LTS releases of Ubuntu.
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You don't get rolodex autocomplete (where you can cycle through the suggestions by pressing tab)
This is determined by your shell.
Or if you don't want to change shells, just bind Tab to the menu-complete command (in ~/.inputrc, or with the command: bind "Tab: menu-complete"). Presto, pressing Tab now cycles through all the possible matches.
autocomplete doesn't automatically fill in quotes for you for filenames with spaces
That's because it doesn't need to. At least in bash, which I assume is the shell you're using, it escapes characters that need to be escaped, so if a filename contains spaces they will be filled in preceded by a backslash.
But sometimes you don't want backslashes in the completion. No problem: the completion will respect whatever quoting style was already started.
Anyone who does significant work in Bash really should read through the manual page some time. There are a lot of useful features available beyond the basics
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Au contraire, mon frere
Ubuntu has a strong track record of deliberately choosing things that are not ready for prime time - the move back to X is probably an indication that Wayland is finally stable.
Re:See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's a bit more than that. The statement has been in various circles 'wayland is good enough *today*, you don't need xorg anymore'
This is acceptance that people do have things they can't do in Wayland, and it needs to be opt-in rather than opt-opt to avoid bad user experience.
It's not 'wayland will *never* be better', but it is a statement that it has a ways to go, and some of the limitations are design choices that will require interesting conversations, particularly about security with regards to screen sharing.
Re:See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:4, Interesting)
This is called the Tyranny of the Default [pagefair.com], and is a real thing.
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Research shows that users don’t actively want every ad to be blocked
The fuck are they talking about? Get that shit out of here. I visit web pages for the content, not the ads. If your page need ads to survive, maybe it's better off dead.
Re: See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:2)
This isn't Linux, it is Ubuntu. :-P
Re:See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:5, Interesting)
A vendor in it for money chooses to backtrack and default away from the new and shiny. I don't think that is about choice and a hell of a lot more about what they think of the current state of Wayland.
Re:See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point that 40 year old code based designed around a 386 when the software had to draw even the primitives just isn't going to cut it anymore.
You got the reality exactly backwards. A codebase designed around being efficient enough to run on a 386, and field-tested on every thing imaginable for 40 years.
Anything that today's wonder boys can generate, is destined to be a steaming pile in comparison - just because they never saw a reason to learn what efficiency or portability even is.
Barring a major miracle, X will stay with us for quite some time yet.
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Yeah, its so easy to hack thats why it's hackers favourite attack vector into *nix systems. Oh, wait...
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I guess you don't know about port 6000 then. Was open by default for years. I don't remember it being a major attack entry point.
Re:See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:4, Informative)
The code is actually not bad in my opinion and due to its age, a lot of problems have already been fixed a long time ago. Ilja von Sprundel (just featured in another story on slashdot) did some auditing a couple of years ago and fixed many bugs. He gave a talk about it on the CCC conference and he seemed actually quite fond of X from a security perspective (quotes: "the developer involved actually amazing" and about the core protocol "this code is actually pretty cool (from a security perspective) you can see where the code got patched over (e.g. integer overflow checks)") . In fact, he seriously complained about clients and in particular about Qt/KDE in this talk. This is a much newer code base...
Re:See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:5, Informative)
But even setting this aside, X.org is insecure by design. Any application can just send any events to any other application, so there's no point in trying to make it secure. If you have access to an X connection then you already have full access to the user's data. For example, you simply can inject "ctrl-t" into the shell to launch a terminal and then inject any commands you want into it.
And about "todays wonder boys" - Wayland is designed and written mostly by the same developers who are working on X.org
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I worked on X codebase and I know it's shit. It's a patched-over shit, but still. Integer overflows, memory corruption, it has everything.
.What did you work ont?
But even setting this aside, X.org is insecure by design. Any application can just send any events to any other application, so there's no point in trying to make it secure. If you have access to an X connection then you already have full access to the user's data.
Any application on the same host can hijack any other even without X. Ever used a debugger? Wonder how it works? For remote, you have point. There is a solution: Untrusted X Clients. I would need a bit of work, and I would rather prefer people fixing these minor things instead of rewriting everything.
For example, you simply can inject "ctrl-t" into the shell to launch a terminal and then inject any commands you want into it.
You can do this without X.
And about "todays wonder boys" - Wayland is designed and written mostly by the same developers who are working on X.org
Not really, most X developers seem to still work on X and not on Wayland (Packard, Coppersmith, ...)
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Except that in X there can be multiple applications at different privilege levels. That sudo in an X terminal? Totally vulnerable for an application that runs in a browser and has somehow gained access to the X socket. Never mind that ptrace() can be effectively limited through a multitude of methods (LSM, namespaces, caps).
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For example, X.org is single-threaded so it doesn't need synchronization. Except that it isn't. Signal handlers for input devices can whack the cursor state directly. And if you want to do a device handover so an application can take exclusive ownership of a device you'll
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I worked on the input stack.
I have to admit that I never looked at this part. It must be bad considering that this is where most prominent wayland developers also came from.
Except that in X there can be multiple applications at different privilege levels. That sudo in an X terminal? Totally vulnerable for an application that runs in a browser and has somehow gained access to the X socket.
I pointed out the solution: X clients could be isolated against each other. This would require some work, but the fundamental parts to make this work exist in X already for a long time.
Never mind that ptrace() can be effectively limited through a multitude of methods (LSM, namespaces, caps).
Wake me up if any Linux distribution ships with proper isolation between different programs from the same user. There are many issues and not just ptrace or X. And no, I do not see r
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I pointed out the solution: X clients could be isolated against each other
No, they can not be isolated. X.org is shared across all clients and it can't be changed without re-architecting it. Attempts to do it (XAce) died ignominiously. You'll need to introduce multiple independent X servers and a layer above them to orchestrate input devices and access to direct rendering. In short, you'll get Wayland.
Wake me up if any Linux distribution ships with proper isolation between different programs from the same user.
Ding! Wake up call! Ubuntu does it quite well with snaps.
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I pointed out the solution: X clients could be isolated against each other
No, they can not be isolated.
Why not? The necessary hooks seem to be all there. Untrusted X Clients are isolated against trusted X Clients. This seems to work.
X.org is shared across all clients and it can't be changed without re-architecting it.
A wayland shell would also be shared by its clients, or? With the security hooks already there, why is there are need for re-architecting?
Attempts to do it (XAce) died ignominiously.
True, but without proper access isolation for processes with the same UID, there was also no point.
You'll need to introduce multiple independent X servers and a layer above them to orchestrate input devices and access to direct rendering. In short, you'll get Wayland.
I don't mind splitting up X or re-architecting parts of it (although I do not quite see why you think it is needed - we also have a monolithic ke
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Why not? The necessary hooks seem to be all there. Untrusted X Clients are isolated against trusted X Clients. This seems to work.
Who told you this nonsense? X.org doesn't have any real distinction between clients. They are all similarly "trusted".
There's a thin veneer of SECURITY and XAce extensions which are not used by anybody. They are not even build-enabled in Debian and CentOS. They are also utterly inadequate, for example, SECURITY extension puts all "untrusted" clients together as there's no per-client isolation and doesn't prevent all sniffing.
A wayland shell would also be shared by its clients, or? With the security hooks already there, why is there are need for re-architecting?
Wayland clients don't have access to each other without shell explicitly granting
Re:See Saw Cycles of Adoption and Abandonment (Score:4, Insightful)
> that 40 year old code based designed around a 386
It's less than 30 years, and you can say exactly the same about Linux.
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No you can't. When you run Xorg on your modern computer you are using about 8% of the code base, all the rest of that codebase is still sitting there in the binary waiting for a security hole that NO ONE is looking for.
The people that developed Wayland are the same people that developed X86. They realized before they started the Wayland project that the x86 code base is such a nasty pile of hacks and shit that's not used anymore that it's simply impossible to move forward without a total rewrite because it
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The idea that X has been abandoned for Wayland by its own developers is a myth. Even a brief look at the relevant mailing lists makes it absolutely clear that this is far from the truth.
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If that was the case, they wouldn't be switching the default BACK to X. They would never have made Wayland the default at all. If they were feeling especially sour about it, Wayland wouldn't have even been an option.
The problem is Wayland, like most of Freedesktop has been all about claiming "nobody uses that anyway" and then when throngs of people report that they DO, long on promises like "you'll be able to do that again real soon now" and short on delivery.
The same sort of nonsense is what caused Mozilla
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I disagree. If they were totally abandoning Wayland, then you'd have a point. They simply saying, "Hey! Look! Choice! Yay us."
Like they did with systemd, right?
LK
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so .. pretty much in keeping with Ubuntu mindset. Why are they dumping it again?
But but .... (Score:5, Funny)
... the Wayland devs kept telling us that no one cares about remoting with X which is why they hardly bothered to work on that side of it. Were they wrong?? Say it ain't so!
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I guess that's just a hard to discover easter egg, like mouse paste [gnome.org].
Re:But but .... (Score:5, Informative)
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"gparted should not run its UI as root. It should run its UI as a regular user and use PolicyKit or something else similar to gain elevated privileges only when necessary to query or modify devices"
I'm all about being angry, but this makes sense. root only when needed, we don't need root for the UI.
Re:But but .... (Score:4, Insightful)
"gparted should not run its UI as root. It should run its UI as a regular user and use PolicyKit or something else similar to gain elevated privileges only when necessary to query or modify devices"
Why? Because Wayland devs decided the UI should not run as root? Because breaking functionality in the name of a misguided sense of security is fashionable?
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In general, each process should operate with the least possible privilege [wikipedia.org]. Windows went through this in 2007 when Windows Vista cut off services' ability to display a GUI. Splitting it into a GUI to parse (possibly untrusted) user input and a worker to do the actual work, with a narrow communication channel between the two, makes it less likely that an inadvertent flaw in the GUI will cause problems in the elevated part.
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But what if you are root, and want a GUI?
Or does your system administration never do anything more complex that a single DOS command?
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I manage all my RHEL and CentOS servers with no GUI, and I've never had a problem. Also, privilege separation is a thing. The more stuff you run elevated, the more chance of an exploit. A UI toolkit is a huge attack surface. Better to just run the parts that need elevated privileges as root and keep the GUI running as a regular user.
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but you need to "think of the children"
Actually I think it's more like "think of the security hole". I can't say I disagree with the fact that old software should use the modern way of interacting with a modern system if it wants to work for users.
Expecting full backwards compatibility for everything for ever just invites any script kiddy to take over your computer. It's amazing how we're progressive about protocol adoption and depreciation in Linux, ... until it comes to some GUI application that hasn't gotten its act together in the past sever
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What security hole? I'm more worried about my user data than about some imagined security hole, and blocking root apps won't protect the user data.
Obligatory xkcd - https://xkcd.com/1200/ [xkcd.com]
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What security hole?
The one they fixed through the introduction of polkit to allow fine grained access control to the system. If you don't understand why Polkit exists and why it's preferred I don't expect you'll ever understand the security aspects of what Wayland specifically avoids here by design.
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What forever? Wayland is barely used. You sound like it's been the dominant GUI display for 5 years.
Re:But but .... (Score:4, Interesting)
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That's a funny thing. Most of Wayland's fan's claims for workarounds hinge on apps continuing to support X. I guess the easiest way to make sure of that is to use X.
Perhaps Wayland should just formally make itself a next generation X server and be done with it.
Re:But but .... (Score:4, Interesting)
x host si:localuser:root
was all I meeded
So all you needed to get Wayland to work properly was... X.
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And by "work properly" you mean back track an architectural choice that has been pushed for security reasons for the past 3 years.
Man if you people were around when sudo was adopted you'd still be suggesting everyone log in as root.
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Man if you people were around when sudo was adopted you'd still be suggesting everyone log in as root.
Log in with the user/group with the least amount of privileges needed to do the job. Create new users/groups/permissions/contexts if needed. sudo is privilege escalation, which is made for convenience, is inherently insecure and leads to exploits. I don't have sudo on my systems, for security reasons. Privilege escalation is the Windows way of doing things, while the Unix way is to only drop privileges, not escalate them.
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Instead of 'sudo', but about just 'su' ? So instead of using sudo to do something, I su to the needed user, do that thing with the necessary privilege, then switch back to my regular user/whatever?
If you do "/bin/su -" (including the hyphen), it's safer. You then don't inherit any of the environment that you do with just "su", and don't risk running a different su that someone who hacked your account might have left there.
And yes, it's IMHO much safer than sudo because there's no privilege escalation. Knowing your own password should not be enough to get root access. It's much easier for a hacker to hack any of the user passwords that has sudo access than it is to hack just the root password. And
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I guess that's just a hard to discover easter egg, like mouse paste.
No, fuck you, we ARE going to turn Linux into a cheap half-arsed knockoff of Windows 95, uhhh Windows XP, er I mean OSX.
Screw anyone who actually uses it. We HAVE to assume that the only way of getting The Year Of The Linux Desktop is to make it a crap version of everything else out there.
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You won't get a "Year Of The Linux Desktop" if
We're not getting the year of the linux desktop either way. Seeing linux shipped by default on a significant minority of laptops and desktops? Not happening.
So, these quixhotic attempts to create such a year by destroying everything the current users like about the desktop is going to make things worse, not better.
And, if you're running an office without some kind of remote admin stuff installed so you can sutomatically roll out policy changes of some sort then
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Actually, for executing a remote application, Wayland can accomodate with Xwayland.
Here the thing is sharing your screen, like in a teleconference situation or accessing your whole screen remotely rather than X forwarding which Wayland can't accommodate, in part due to intentional design decisions to mitigate security risks.
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... the Wayland devs kept telling us that no one cares about remoting with X which is why they hardly bothered to work on that side of it. Were they wrong?? Say it ain't so!
Not at all. Remote desktop was always important to a subset of users that were not at all targeted by Wayland. Those same users happen to also be the ones who would use LTS releases of Ubuntu.
If you read the original post they will use Wayland as defaults on all other releases and specifically rushed Wayland to 17.10 to gauge if it will be a default in 18.04LTS. But there are some features that need to be worked on before it will be suitable for LTS release.
But by all means smug on.
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This is absolutely incorrect.
Remote desktop was always going to happen on Wayland, the dev's just didn't want it baked right into the protocol where it would cause all the same problems it's caused on xorg over the last 20 years. There was a wicked misunderstanding between users and the devs and yes it was probably the dev's fault, but they always intended for their to be remote desktop capability, just not baked into the protocol where it doesn't belong.
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What is the fundamental problem with remote?
You have to understand that any efficient graphics system today has to treat buffers as remote anyway, as they live on the other side of the PCI bus on a discrete GPU. It is also therefor not too surprising that both Wayland and X are in fact very similar in how graphics is done with modern clients. There is no fundamental difference. Wayland just lacks a lot of functionality compared to X and is not backwards compatible.
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Some people are not working on home computers!
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Even if you're in the same facility, you probably don't want to squint at a rack mounted LCD display in a room that sounds like it's full of angry bees.
Why switch to Wayland in the first place? (Score:4, Interesting)
Despite it's touted simplicity, Wayland lags behind X functionality in both network awareness and driver support, as well as still a slight lag in performance [phoronix.com] despite its purported closeness to the hardware compared to X. Am I misunderstanding something?
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Wayland lags behind X functionality in both network awareness and driver support
So things that matter to users of LTS releases and pretty much no one else?
In the meantime there's a laundry list of reasons X.org is a horrible system to use on a desktop. Which is also why you'll see Wayland as the default in 18.10 again.
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In the meantime there's a laundry list of reasons X.org is a horrible system to use on a desktop.
OK, I'll bite.
Like what?
So far about 80% of them are "I refuse to acknowledge the existence of any new API calls past about 1987". A few others centre around the kernel being unreasonably slow, and there's one or two decent points.
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Yeah I was doing some big X11 development a couple years ago and was stunned by just how far things haven't progressed since I was looking at Motif in the '90's. In fact the application I was working on was a Motif program, if you can believe it. Oh God that thing was crap, and there was really no way to fix it in X.
Well, no. I mean you're using a program using a late 1980s era toolkit. It'd be like using the Windows 16 bit API on modern as a reason to not use Windows. Yes being M*tif, your experience will
Re:Why switch to Wayland in the first place? (Score:5, Informative)
Right indeedio I will bite!
Forget the speed,
Yes indeed, forget that because there's no evidence X is slow. Sure it was slow on a Sun 3/60 and people were maybe right to whine then. It's been a very VERY long time since I've run a 20MHz desktop CPU.
the issues around hardware access
Which are?
the issues on on exclusive access that creates a huge security issue for lockscreens
Oh you mean the issue that doesn't happen at all if you use a compositor like 99% of modern desktops. Note: if the desktpos don't implement that, it's their fault not an inherent limitation in X.
the inability to use most of the buttons on a laptop while a locked session is in progress (but yes having to open up and login to a device just to hit the volume down key is totally what we expect from modern 2018 systems).
Ah yes, the thing that isn't an issue with a modern compositor architecture. Note: bugs in gnome aren't bugs in X11.
Look: the modern X architecture routes EVERYTHING through the compositor just like Wayland. So the security tradeoffs are identical. It's impossible for an actave grab to interpose.
If gnome have done a shit job of actually using the features that X has had for the last decade or more, blame gnome, not X.
I'm not going to repeat them all here (because who has the time), this horse has been beaten to death so often it is now a goo of red puree mushed into the carpets
No it hasn't. It's been beaten by ill-informed people repeating poorly understood talking points.
Honestly... I'm sure why... (Score:5, Insightful)
...we even have Wayland/Mir.
The X Server stack was fast enough back in the days of the FOUR-EIGHTY-SIX.
And almost all the implementations of the new system lack features that we already expect to work on x server without thinking about it.
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Re:Honestly... I'm sure why... (Score:4, Insightful)
I trust the developers to know better than the users when a rewrite is due
As a developer who has been on way too many misguided rewrite projects, I do not share this credulousness.
"Ugh, this code is so messy!"
"I know! Let's rewrite it!"
And thus we enter purgatory.
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The X Server stack was fast enough back in the days of the FOUR-EIGHTY-SIX.
And I'm sure if all we care about is drawing rectangles on the screen it still would be.
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Funnily X11 is a lot like Lisp in that, during the course of rewriting it, they'll probably make exactly the same mistakes and require the same work-arounds until the Wayland is such a steaming pile of shit tha
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The blackjack and hookers was Ubuntu's Mir and Unity - Half a decade wasted on that.
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Re:Honestly... I'm sure why... (Score:5, Informative)
Because back in the days of the "FOUR-EIGHTY-SIX" your cpu was generally faster than your graphics card. Nowadays your graphics card is so much faster than your cpu the X stack leaves your graphics rendering waiting on the CPU.
No it isn't: X has supported hardware acceleration from the earliest days and continues to do so. See, for example GlamourGL, in which Xorg uses OpenGL shaders to do all the 2D drawing operations.
So Wayland is an attempt (successful or not is an entirely different discussion) to get the cpu out of the way for your graphics card to work more efficiently.
No, that's utter crap. Wayland doesn't do that AT ALL. Wayland is basically a system for sending bitmapts to a compositor and have the compositor send back input. Wayland provides very little else and certainly no rendering. Applications are expected to render to their own buffers using something like DRI, which is PRECISELY the same as they use under X11 too if running locally.
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No it isn't: X has supported hardware acceleration from the earliest days and continues to do so. See, for example GlamourGL, in which Xorg uses OpenGL shaders to do all the 2D drawing operations.
There's a reason that any serious graphics rendering under Xorg uses DRI. It's because DRI bypasses most of the X stack.
No, that's utter crap. Wayland doesn't do that AT ALL. Wayland is basically a system for sending bitmapts to a compositor and have the compositor send back input. Wayland provides very little else and certainly no rendering.
So what you're saying is wayland gets the cpu out of the way so applications can render on the graphics card more efficiently? wow why didn't I think to say that?
Applications are expected to render to their own buffers using something like DRI, which is PRECISELY the same as they use under X11 too if running locally.
So what you're saying is all that Xorg nonsense just bogs it down and anything rendering 3d any serious graphics is just going to do direct rendering like wayland prefers anyway? holy shit I wish I had thought to say that... oh
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There's a reason that any serious graphics rendering under Xorg uses DRI. It's because DRI bypasses most of the X stack.
By serious graphics, you mean OpenGL?
You do know that OpenGL debuted as a feature of X11, right, you know waaay back in 1993? And you don't even know what you mean when you say "the X stack gets out of the way".
It was never in the way in the forst place. Since it's inception OpenGL has been very efficient on X11. In fact with many bits of X, it's possible to ship data to the card over sha
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Ah yes, we're back to the old "X11 is crap because it provides fast ways to do things" argument.
It's not interesting debating if your axiom is "X is slow".
X isn't slow. Since the late 80s, it provided non-socket ways of sending data to the hardware. That's not "bypassing X", that's using the features of X as designed.
You might as well say Wayland is crap because programs "bypass" it and render directly with DRI.
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I'm well aware of that. Why do you think everyone uses DRI which bypasses X and not indirect rendering for gl which goes through X.
You mean, unless people are running remotely?
Apparently if most systems provide fast ways to do things, that's good. But if X does, then that's bad. WTF.
X provides fast local, and accpetable non local ways of doing things. Only the rabid haters seem to thing this is a bad thing.
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No, it was all about mobile. All the UI rewriting craziness started because people (Ubuntu, Intel, and many others) saw a huge opportunity in building a mobile operating system based on Linux. This is also the reason the interests of its old user base and backwards compatibility were not much of a concern (The reason for the systemd craziness was probably the virtualization I think). Only some clueless fanboys reading phoronix thought it is about making their gaming or desktop experience better and believed
Oh dearie, dearie me (Score:2)
Does this mean that all the things that broke in 17.10 that I then had to work out how to fix will now rebreak because of those same fixes? And I will have to return to where I was?
Really screwed up installing 17.10. Should have stuck to LTS.
Common sense like this should be applauded. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the first time in a long while that a company steps back from what looked like suicidal commitment to a bad idea, and actually went back to what works.
I wish Lenovo did the same with the 7-row keyboardes on the ThinkPad. Also I wish Linux companies (except RedHat, of course) would ditch SystemD.
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from what looked like suicidal commitment to a bad idea
So you mean you didn't read the post? The only reason they stepped back from Wayland is because it specifically breaks screen sharing and many developers have not ported their programs to the Wayland way of doing it, as well as architectural issues with Gnome Shell which can bring down the system and are due to be fixed in 4.0
If you think this is some massive backflip and a thumbs up to X.Org, you're going to be very upset when Ubuntu 18.10 is released.
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Actually Ubuntu does this pretty regularly. That might just mean they make lots of bad decisions, though. Unity. Upstart. Wayland. Nautilus has been upgraded and subsequently regressed twice, I think. Et al.
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Good examples:
Unity - adopted because Gnome Shell was a bucket of shit that looked unfix-able. Dropped once Gnome Shell became "fixed".
Upstart - adopted because sysvinit was garbage and there was no replacement providing the suitable features. Dropped once systemd became suitable.
Wayland - I assume you meant mir? adopted because x.org has it's warts on a modern desktop and it won't ever change without a ground up re-write. Dropped because Wayland became suitable. Wayland still the default, still shipped and
Re: (Score:2)
holy jumpin' speculation, Batman!
16.04 is an LTS release. Most servers run the LTS version of Ubuntu. So, while your average Joe is fine with upgrading every 6 months, there are a massive number of production servers running an almost two year old LTS about to upgrade to this, and their sysadmin concerns have to be taken into account before this is released. It's going to have to keep them happy for another two years 'til the next release as well.
Ubuntu is smart enough to keep that backwards compatibili
LTS (Score:3)
gnome-shell wayland disaster (Score:3, Interesting)
The shit is a total clusterfuck with Wayland. Something happens to gnome-shell--REBOOT. Some random gnome-shell plugin acts bad, no way to unload it--REBOOT. Mouse stops working--REBOOT. Come back from screen lock and clicks don't work--REBOOT.
All of this shit is possible to completely fix non-destructively when gnome-shell runs under X by Alt-F2 'r', or lacking input, Ctrl-Alt-F1 'killall -HUP gnome-shell'.
Now Alt-F2 'r' is disabled, and every other previously working solution causes EVERYTHING to be killed, because now gnome-shell is the parent of the entire session. The gnome-shell developers have basically said tough, this is intended operation, and you shouldn't need to restart the shell ever. Fuck them. I leave my workstation powered up for months on end, yet I have to restart gnome-shell it seems every week or two sometimes.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is it is out of gnome shell's hands in wayland. in X they have a responsibility, but that responsibility isn't core to the applications working.
In Wayland architecture, gnome shell is basically the X server. Now they could do a better job segregating their code and have a more bulletproof core to be the wayland compositor, but it's just a whole new role they had never had to handle in the past.
Good job Canonical (Score:4, Insightful)
I think they should be congratulated on responding to user sentiment. I wish more companies would admit they acted prematurely and roll back changes that didn't work out. I can think of one or two very large Linux features that I could live without, but which are foisted on all of us.
Hey Wayland devs... (Score:2)
talk to Poettering, I am sure he can hook you up to be the de-facto standard despite the shortcomings of Wayland.
LTS (Score:2)
Xorg just won't f*cking die. (Score:2)
You have to admit, they do tend to stick around no matter what newfangled graphics server comes around. Hold old X11 now? 30+ years or something? ... Nice.
Whats New is Old Again (Score:2)
No wonder Google switched to Debian as a distribution base. Shuttleworth has turned Ubuntu into a major clusterf*ck.
Re: (Score:2)
It's best to let all those Fedora and Arch users work out the Wayland kinks on their crashing systems before adopting as a default.
Works for Microsoft...
Re: (Score:2)
It's best to let all those Fedora and Arch users work out the Wayland kinks on their crashing systems before adopting as a default.
Works for Microsoft...
Can you elaborate?
Microsoft historically does it's OS and Application debugging after releasing a new version, based on feedback from telemetry and user complaints,,,
Re: (Score:2)