On Tue, 2010-11-09 at 17:40 +0000, Andrew Haley wrote: > I'm wondering of I'm reading this correctly. The downsides that have > been described are quite severe in contrast to the possible benefits. > It is, of course, possible that a mistake has been made, and the acute > loss of functionality is just scaremongering. It's also possible that > I've misunderstood something. The downsides that have been described include: - We lose network transparency! Well, sure, the protocol doesn't have that directly. You can still do vnc-like things trivially and with a modest amount of additional wayland protocol (or just inter-client conventions) you can do spice-like things. This is good, not bad, because efficient remoting protocols do not look like X. Now we get to design a good one, and in the meantime vnc-style remoting sure does go a long way towards being good enough. (But, we can't switch yet, because we don't even have vnc-style remoting yet; so we're not switching yet.) - We lose support for older hardware! Yep. Here's a nickel. We have sufficient kernel support for this for the big three hardware vendors, and we're probably going to see more ports to the marginal hardware in the next year or two. Losing <1% of the hardware support isn't keeping me up at night. (But, we can't switch yet, because there's not a good fallback design to classic X on that kind of hardware, and it includes things enterprisey people run on; so we're not switching yet.) - All my X apps have to be ported! Yes, if they want to be native wayland clients, they do. If they don't, you can run a nested X server like on OSX. They'll still work as well as they ever did, and you even get to keep ssh forwarding of them. You can run a wayland server that does nothing but run a nested X server and you wouldn't ever know the difference. Except of course that your shell and your screensaver can be wayland apps, which means your screen locker will still work even if an app has a menu open, and you can actually do secure password input, and and and. (But, we really don't have _any_ good native wayland apps yet, thus the benefit of native apps are at the moment theoretical; so we're not switching yet.) Anything I'm missing? - ajax
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