<story><title>Facts about Wayland vs X</title><url>http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&amp;item=x_wayland_situation&amp;num=1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vardump</author><text>Wayland is a critical technology for Linux desktop community.&lt;p&gt;X11 has been a reliable workhorse, but its time is up - simply too much cruft accumulated over the years that&amp;#x27;s not even used anymore. Yet all of it needs to be continually supported, adding to complexity. No one uses X11 primitives for drawing apart from bitmap functionality - even repainting dirty regions (expose events) often involves sending over a new bitmap and using X11 to draw it. This is very inefficient.&lt;p&gt;To implement a reasonably fast GUI, X11 has essentially resorted to hacks (extensions). DRI2 (+GLX) is probably the most important of those. AFAIK, it&amp;#x27;s what almost everything uses for drawing, and does not work over network at all. Yes, modern X11 is local only. If you&amp;#x27;re on a network, it&amp;#x27;s back sending those uncompressed bitmaps. Even with all these hacks, X11+DRI2 can&amp;#x27;t even maintain tearing free display. Well, at least DRI3 should fix tearing...&lt;p&gt;So if none of modern software needs nothing but a bitmap surface to draw on, why implement and maintain anything else?&lt;p&gt;Which leaves us with Wayland criticizers&amp;#x27; favorite topic - network transparency (which X11 practically doesn&amp;#x27;t have either, but unfortunately that does little to stop some loud uninformed people):&lt;p&gt;Remote display software should use low latency video encoding for essentially same user experience as working locally. Preferably hardware accelerated. But even with software, you can encode a frame under 10ms, using for example a subset of h.264. Even if you added network latency, time for one frame network throughput and client display hardware retrace period, you&amp;#x27;d still typically end up with a figure well under 50ms. That&amp;#x27;d feel essentially local. It&amp;#x27;d beat easily X11 over network, VNC, RDP, etc. in latency and thus practical usability. Heck, that&amp;#x27;d even beat Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 game display latency when connected to a typical modern TV (70-170ms)! Many TVs do image processing that adds over 50ms of latency before image is actually displayed. (Note that this processing latency has nothing to do with &amp;quot;pixel response time&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;Why no one I know of has written remote display software that functions this way is beyond me. Anyone except OnLive and Gaikai, that is...&lt;p&gt;So, let the old X11 horse have its well-earned rest. It&amp;#x27;s time to move on.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facts about Wayland vs X</title><url>http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&amp;item=x_wayland_situation&amp;num=1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jmhain</author><text>Daniel Stone actually did a talk involving much of the same subject matter called &amp;quot;The Real Story behind Wayland and X&amp;quot;. I&amp;#x27;d recommend that over this article (which was partially written by the same guy). He&amp;#x27;s actually a really charismatic speaker.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=RIctzAQOe44&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=RIctzAQOe44&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>