Mir, the next generation of X

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 03:52:34PM +1100, Andrew Cowie wrote:
> Canonical is at it again. It doesn't really matter that they think they
> can do well. It's that they're doing it by themselves, rather than as a
> part of the [existing] community.
> 
> I'd encourage you to watch 
> http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/mp4/The_real_story_behind_Wayland_and_X.mp4
> which is the recording of a talk Daniel Stone gave at LCA this year,
> http://lca2013.linux.org.au/schedule/30256/view_talk?day=friday
> 
> Most of the talk is describing all the things that have piled up as a
> result of ~4 decades of decisions in the design and implementation of
> the X server. I'll apologize for encouraging you to watch something
> where there are lots of interjections from the audience that didn't make
> it to the audio track, but the room was full of X hackers, notably Kieth
> Packard [X.org] and Carl Worth [cairo graphics]. I think that Linus guy
> was there, too.
> 
> The end result is that [people who would know] having described all of
> X's shortcomings, they then describe what Wayland *is*. It didn't take
> very long. Wow. I can't wait.
> 
> You can draw your own conclusions, but it's pretty impressive when
> people can step back from their work, learn from it, and head in a new
> direction. I'm sure Canonical will have fun writing Mir, but they're not
> going to have much help from the rest of us.

Well whatever wayland manages to do, it better start with a really good
X11 emulation, because if all existing software doesn't work right away,
then it isn't going to fly.

Once you have full backwards compatibility through some emulation,
then you can start to get people to care about using the new stuff.
But you will probably never be able to completely get rid of X11 support.
It just doesn't have to be the actual server.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists