Fedora moving to wayland

[Derek Atkins]

David Miller <david3d-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes:

[snip]
>> This is just like ssh -X. Yes, it's far off, but no one is talking
>> about making remoting a thing of the past.
>>
>
> Yeah I know that this is being worked on.  But since Wayland isn't
> here yet I wouldn't worry too much about network transparency yet.  As
> the intent is not only to replace X windows with a modern replacement
> but to also replace X's network transparency with a modern
> replacement.  Both are long over due and I for one am looking forward
> to seeing what comes out of this.

Well, it sounds like people are talking about switching to Wayland in
the 6-12 months, or at least that's my take on it.  It'll be packaged in
F15 (6 months from now); who knows when it'll be swapped over to the
default (F16, 12 months?).

Keep in mind that X was written back in the 80s when networks we
1-10mbps ethernets; personally I don't have an issue with most remote-X
applications.  Admittedly I usually only just run emacs or xterm, and I
do admit running mythtv-setup over remote-X from off my LAN can be
painful.

I've just seen the open source community move from a working system to a
"new and improved" system that is not as featureful, but then they drop
the working system completely without making the new version
feature-compatible.  Then those of us using those no-longer-available
features of the old working system get left in the lurch.

No, this is not a theoretical concern.  I've seen it happen with the
i810->intel video driver (losing zaphod mode). I've seen it with some
GTK graphics library, Guppi (gtk1) -> GOffice (gtk2) (losing click-back
functionality).  I'm sure if I put more than 30 seconds into it I could
come up with additional places where I personally have been burned by
this, so pardon me if I'm a bit scared by the prospect of losing a core
functionality of the display system of Unix, which has for 20+ years
been one of the major selling points.

> David

-derek

PS: I remember visiting my friend at Georgia Tech in 1990, borrowing a
Mac (with OS8 or OS9), running an X server, logging back into my MIT
Athena account and having all my MIT environment displayed on the Mac.
And it was still usable!

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord-DPNOqEs/LNQ at public.gmane.org                        PGP key available